Quick View for Announcement Read Receipts

[skalkwarf]

It would be nice if, as instructors, we could quickly see who had opened an announcement, as an indication that they read it (or at least pretended to). 

I realize that this information is available in the Access Report, however, opening this for each student is time consuming when all I want to know is if they saw the announcement in a timely fashion.  

I propose that a feature be added to the "three-dot" menu on announcements that would allow an instructor to see a roster of all students with an indicator (green check for opened, red circle for unread) next to the students name.  This would allow instructors to have a "quick glance" check to determine who may need another contact.

[kmeeusen]

Ah yes! as a Father of four, Grandfather of 13 and Great Grandfather of two that is a very apt analogy! 

KLM

[Renee_Carney]

This idea will remain in the open voting forum as an idea related to Priority: Analytics 2: Teacher & Student‌

*Being a related idea does not guarantee it is slated for development, instead it indicates that the idea is related to the overall scope and is being used to inform the process.

[lindalee]

If you have notification settings for "Announcement Created By You" set to something other than "Never" (the default setting), then you'll get notified when someone comments on an announcement. Comments on announcements is part of this notification setting.

[laurakgibbs]

This is something I really struggle with also: I consider the announcements an important part of my class, but the students who probably most NEED to read the announcements are the ones who are least likely to do so. And I totally agree with  @kmeeusen ‌'s observation above: Humorous fact - my worst students are my faculty, they never read anything, then vilify their own students for the same behavior. 

Same also applies for students putting things off to the last minute... something I know I do too, just so much for school ... but in other things. So, a little empathy goes a long way here, as often.

I voted up on this because, sure, if people think analytics will help them, then they should be able to get the data they need out of their course, but I really don't think analytics would help with me with actual student engagement with the announcements, i.e. reading them, using them, thinking about them. If I get analytics that tell me Student X is not reading the announcements (and I probably would not be surprised to find this out, given other metrics I can see), I can send Student X an email that says, hey, you know, you should probably be reading the announcements... but Student X already knows that they should be doing that. The problem is how you create better habits, and that's something we all struggle with in different areas of our lives.

Here are three things I've tried to do with the announcements that seem to help as I've worked on this problem over the years:

1) Make sure the students encounter the announcements in multiple ways: I have them as the homepage of my Canvas courses (click and see: Myth.MythFolklore.net), I include the links to the announcements blog in almost every email I send to students, and I also encourage them to subscribe to the announcements by email.

2) Make the announcements fun and engaging in addition to including practical course information.

3) Give the students the option to review the announcements at the end of the week (since I don't really even expect anybody is reading the announcements every day); as part of the review, I ask them to tell me what was their favorite item in the announcements, and that helps me figure out what they do connect with.

I'm doing a CanvasLIVE on my announcements system next week, and I already prepped the slidedeck and such, so feel free to explore — there's a link to the slidedeck in the comments on the event:

Practical Tips for Using a Blog as a Course Home Page 

[kmeeusen]

kyoung 

One of the things I suggest to my faculty who ask for metrics so that they can attempt to change the habits of a 40 year old former construction worker is this:

• Put one or two questions at the end of each announcement that relate to the content of the announcement,
• Require your students to reply to the announcement, and
• In their reply answer the question(s),
• Make their reply worth enough points to be worth their time.
• Create a No Submission assignment,
• Create a rubric for that assignment with a Criterion for each regular announcement (yep, you'll have to determine how many announcements you are going to use each term, and divvy up the points possible for each reply),
• Set the ratings for each criteria as max or none (points),
• Use that Rubric to keep a running grade for the term.

I always caution about over-use of Announcements - save them for important stuff - and suggest just weekly announcements at most. I mean, even my most OCD students could care less about daily "How You All Doin' " announcements with a reminder of due dates that are posted in a half-dozen places, and will tune out. I think heavy users of announcements really need to carefully and honestly review the content they generally tend to place in Announcements. If it doesn't bring value to the learning, then stop doing them, or only do ones that do bring value. Survey your students and see what level of value they place on them. Consider using an FAQ discussion or some similar tool instead.

There can be as many variations on this as your mind can conceive, but the point is that "Points talk, and talking walks!", or maybe "Carrots instead of sticks". As laurakgibbs noted above, I could just skim down my gradebook, and identify the students who aren't reading my announcements, if I actually used them. But instead of looking at those low scores or missed submissions and posting another announcement for everybody, I reach out directly to those students individually.

I hope this helps,

KLM

[laurakgibbs]

That is a good distinction about the different purposes that announcements serve,  @kmeeusen ‌ ... and it's important to make the process clear for the students too, since they are seeing different announcements styles/purposes in each of their classes.

For me, the announcements are actually an important part of the class content; I teach Gen. Ed. Humanities classes, so a big goal of the class is just to get the students hooked in to that world of read and writing and art and music that is the Humanities. The announcements are a fun and powerful way for me to do that, but I make sure the place the "class procedures" item up at the top for students who are expecting "just the facts, ma'am" from the announcements. Although I am always hoping to lure them to more than just "when is that assignment due?" type of announcement content. 🙂

[jbrady2]

 @kmeeusen ‌ I love your "Humorous fact". I have worked with several faculty that often display some of the same behaviors they complain the most about in their students

[kmeeusen]

 @jbrady2 

Thanks!

I moonlight as an online teacher for two colleges, and have taught online since 1999, so I think that excuses me saying, "Teachers make the worst students."

Before teaching, I worked for a very long time in health care, and we said the same thing about doctors.

Before that I worked as a Commercial Fisherman in Alaska, and we could honestly have said that fishermen make the worst fishes, because we would get less per pound for them.

KLM

[laurakgibbs]

Now why can't I press like MULTIPLE times to go like-like-like??? 🙂

[chriscas]

I was tempted to vote this down, but I'll just abstain instead...

While I definitely can see the usefulness of the idea, I think it's going to be much too hard to actually track this accurately.  As has been mentioned by others, announcements, by their nature, can be viewed in various ways...

• Going into the course with a web browser and clicking the announcement (this is the most basic, and should be able to be easily tracked).
• Viewed using the same procedure on a mobile app (again, this *should* be trackable, but I know the mobile app is always more challenging).
• Viewed as a notification through the mobile app (this may be impossible to track, as not all notification systems in phones would report back if a notification is clicked, and short announcements could be read without even clicking or anything (at least on an iPhone).
• Viewed in a notification email (again, this is not going to be tracked at all, without requiring some kind of manual steps by the student, which I wouldn't be in favor of).

[kyoung]

The mechanics might be an issue with multiple ways to access.

Read receipts, like we can do in Outlook email, would be one alternative, though I have no idea how this might work. For students, we could set out a policy for Notifications preferences that would be confirmed by a screenshot assignment confirming thatfor examplenotifications of announcements were immediate to either text or email. However, this still keeps us at the individual level.

One of the reasons that I asked for a collective tracking of announcement views is that not all of my/our use of Canvas is student course related. Many of us work with our peers in Canvas spaces for communities of practice and other forms of professional development, which changes the level of compulsion appropriate to policy.

I'm also an amateur data collector. (I teach Humanities and Composition.). I want to know who has seen what and when, among other things. I do not want to pester with more polls than I do nor do I want have to micromanage individuals (at the very least this is tedious).

Additionally, not all Canvas users are adults. If I were back in K12 land, I would expect much more of the hands on duties because there we find mandates to contact students if not only the recognition that we teach more meta skills for learning how to learn. There, parents can be called if students go astray or digitally AWOL.

In college, I want to be able to expediently help all students and keep both busy work and blanket emails to a minimum. If I could scan for who read what collectively, I could reach out more selectively.

This was an Angel feature I appreciated.

I use announcements for updates, collective feedback, and introductions or clarifications. I do not blanket each day with a message "because". Perhaps we could somehow selectively code announcements for read receipts, rather than all of them, like we do with likes on other discussions. That was my original thought last year. The choice is there, but the function is not.

Sent from my iPhone

[don_bryn]

It is in all my course syllabi that students must set their notifications to receive announcements immediately, and then that is the avenue I use to notify students of immediately important information.   But of course some students never set up their notification preferences and it would be valuble to me to be able to see which students read the announcements instead of having to wait until they email me because they missed an assignment or whatever piece of information I spread via that announcement.

[joya_scott]

This is incredibly important in my large courses... I need quick ways to see how many students are reading what I post and who they are. This is critical to Canvas' priority of Teaching & Learning at Scale. 

[jeremy_stevens]

This feature would be incredibly helpful for instructors at our institution, especially those who manage large courses.

Regarding a couple of the identified problems:

1. Students who read email notifications – Email open rates have been able to be tracked for some time now. Email newsletter clients like Mailchimp do this, and they can also track who opened those emails. There are ways of doing this technically, and at the very least, determining a student cohort's email open rate (as a percentage) for announcements would be very useful as an interim feature.

2. Push notifications on mobile devices – I do not feel this should be a large concern or barrier to implementing this feature. I would expect most announcements made are longer than a sentence or two, and any push notification to a mobile device is only going to contain that initial lede. If a student is only reading the first half-sentence or sentence of a push notification, to me, that doesn't warrant being count as 'read'. They would have to open it on their device to view the actual announcement's full contents to constitute it being 'read'.

[bkrisenhoover]

So many great contributions have been made to this feature idea.  May I add a couple of functionality suggestions?

Having a simple tool to view who has seen the announcement could be designed/placed as shown below.

A similar function already exists in the grade book as well as within SpeedGrader.

What do you guys think?

All the very best,

Brandon

[lauren_sayer]

Love this idea.  We use announcements all the time and this would be amazing 

[karamcleod]

I REALLY need this feature, especially now when classes that have never been online before have now migrated.

[karamcleod]

Love it

[jlewis7546]

It would be great to have the ability to see the number of read/viewed when posting an announcement.

[aesposito]

I would love to see a feature where teachers can view what students have viewed an announcement. Just like read receipts on a cell phone text.