Global Announcements ONLY for active courses

Global announcments are great. However, for k-12 schools, once students have move from the middle school to the high school, they should no longer receive the middle school principal’s global annoucements. We had a series of middle school global announcements that we thought would be sent to only the middle schoolers but learned that anyone at any point, who had been enrolled in a course in the middle school sub-account would receive that sub-accounts global announcment. 

Basically, my request is for Canvas to add a setting to only allow global announcments for courses in ACTIVE terms for sub-accounts and not for all students enrolled in past enrolled courses. This would keep sub-account announcments seen only by those in the sub-accounts. 

  Perhaps there is a simple checkbox that sub-account admins can use when posting a global announcment and choose to send to all courses (past enrollments included) or to just the current active courses. 

Until we have this setting changed, my elementary and middle school principals can not really use global announcments.    But I know Canvas does a great job listening to us users and I hope this is something that would move Canvas forward for all users. 

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-06-06) 

37 Comments
21051
Community Explorer
Good news! In the recent release notes...
Global Announcements
Manually Concluded and Inactive Enrollments
Global announcements are not displayed to users with manually concluded and inactive enrollments.
Explanation: When a user enrollment was manually changed to concluded or inactive, the user continued to view non-relevant global announcements. Canvas code has been updated to not display global announcements to users with manually concluded and inactive enrollments. Manually concluded enrollments are defined as user enrollments that have been manually  concluded via the Conclude Enrollment link in Canvas, not concluded as scheduled by term, course, or section dates.
So with the help of our fabulous Canvas  CSM and Implementation consultant we ran a script to "manually" conclude classes in past terms and WALA!
This is not a perfect solution, but it in the right direction to a better permanent solution....
BradMoser
Community Contributor

John! Thanks for sharing. Looks like we are moving in the right direction but I am little confused. This doesn't seem to cover my original request which is to NOT send global announcements to students in concluded course by terms, meaning only send to active term courses. Correct? Thanks for your thoughts.  

21051
Community Explorer

Yes, your idea is the ultimate goal, but this release gives us an option to have a stop gap to stop announcements based on old enrollments. For example we have all terms from 16-17 & 17-18 and our students were getting announcements in some cases from 2 or 3 different schools (sub accounts). By us running a script to "manually" conclude courses in all those old terms it has stopped announcements from going to students or teachers that are no longer in active course their school/sub account. 

As your idea explains it it would be the best way (in my opinion), but I'm happy that with this new release I can at least minimize those annoying announcements fro old terms...

Agin thank you for entering this idea and I will continue to promote it until it happens 🙂

straussi
Community Champion

We have a similar need, but consider this scenario ... we use an MS SharePoint portal and provide our users with direct links to their courses. As a result, many of them never see the Dashboard. We would like to be able to make a Global Announcement actually appear in active courses, and by sub-account. In other words, so a Global Announcement would show up just like an instructor course announcement. Worth putting in as a feature idea?

millerjm
Community Champion

 @straussi ‌ that sounds like a great feature idea!  Smiley Happy

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

 @straussi ‌, this definitely isn't the same feature idea as the one you're envisioning, but it might accomplish the goal: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/13848-global-announcements-can-generate-push-notifications?sr=... 

straussi
Community Champion

All ... Done!!  Vote it up 310018_pastedImage_2.png  

Show Global Announcements in Courses 

cms_hickss
Community Contributor
Hildi_Pardo
Community Champion

By manually concluding, however, I think Teachers and Students lose access to viewing the content.   This may not matter for some, but could be an issue for others.

Hildi_Pardo
Community Champion

Does this mean if a student is enrolled in 7 or 8 courses they would see they announcement in each of those courses?