[Announcements] Publish and Unpublish Announcements

I love that Canvas can bring over announcements when I copy content from another Canvas course. This keeps me from copying and pasting announcements I make every semester.  To further develop this feature, it would be nice if Announcements were unpublished on import, meaning the instructor can see them but the students can't. With a "publish button on every announcement, instructors could release announcements quickly when they are needed without the tedious setting of a date and time on each announcement.

 

This feature would also bring announcements in line with other tools in Canvas that use publish and unpublish functionality and would help instructors who might unintentionally be releasing announcements to students from a past semester.

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198 Comments
dhulsey
Community Champion

Hey,  @peytoncraighill ​! We have passed early 2016. Is the larger project for announcement enhancements still on the radar?  Smiley Happy

khirschmann1
Community Novice

It is now one year after you stated that there would be a revamp of Announcements announced.  Have you announced that?  Any updates in regard to this?

laura_burns
Community Novice

I'm adding my voice to the requests to fix the Announcements.  The "publish/unpublish" idea seems like the best one.  I'm very disappointed that so many instructors put this as a priority, and still nothing has been done. 

Laura

dillard
Community Novice

I agree with this suggestion.  Prior LMS system left announcements and assignments unpublished (not released), and clearly distinguished which were available.  Just spend a long session in Chat with Canvas, and all they could say is go to the Student View to see what is visible to students.  This is a real disappointment.

I would also like to see assignments brought over with the suggested date (updated for new semester as Canvas nicely does) but without releasing them automatically.  I typically tweak announcements and assignments each semester, yet appreciate having drafts from prior semester.

chriswhite
Community Participant

I would like to echo several of the previous posts. I just became aware that announcements were set to automatically go out to students, and I would have loved to give my faculty a heads up about this. At this moment, the only workaround I can think of is to keep a copy of the announcement text in an unpublished page and not import the announcements themselves from semester to semester. It sure would be nice if we could publish/unpublish.

costwink
Community Participant

Adding on as a requester for this feature as well.  I would love to have an end date option for each course announcement.  I want to save them all so that I can import them from semester-to-semester but I don't want students to see all of them (the list grows as the term progresses).  Adding an end date like is in place with system announcements would be beneficial.

Jeff_F
Community Champion

If an end date were available I probably wouldn't use it for most announcements as I prefer students have access to all my words of wisdom for reference.  

costwink
Community Participant

And that's the beauty of having the option.  One leaves the date off/blank and students see them all.  Others place a date in the end date box and they are not visible after the date.  Everyone wins Smiley Happy

brandon-davies
Community Novice

What is the point of voting for ideas if they never get implemented? It seems like this would be a simple idea to implement, given that you can publish and unpublish just about everything else, but here it is more than a year after this idea was "accepted" and I this incredibly basic functionality is still missing. My institution just moved to canvas this semester and frankly it has been a frustrating disappointment.

Jeff_F
Community Champion

Hi  @brandon-davies  !  I used my prior LMS for over a decade so change was initially challenging for me.  Once I began adjusting my process to fit how Canvas functions I found new joy in the simplicity.  As related to announcements, I needed to plan ahead and thus copy in my announcements ahead of term start.

As for your comment about the voting and such let me say I understand your point.  There are many pages of ideas (currently 26) with 20 ideas per page.  And these cycle through and are updated every few months.  While I get the point that gathering the voice of the customer is important, and I appreciate the notion of democratizing the identification via popular vote, I am thinking that keeping track of, developing or setting aside nearly 500 ideas every quarter or thereabouts is a daunting task.  The folks in the community, the staff, volunteers, and our peers certainly do a fine job of sorting the wheat from the chaff and I thank them for their effort.  Perhaps the forum is a victim of its own success in that everyone with an idea can post it.  Even a guy named Jeff.  :smileycool: