Send Announcement By Email Before Course Start Date

[sarah_cooper1]

Currently the conditions for an announcement to be sent by email notification to students are: 

- the student's notification settings for 'Announcement' needs to be enabled (the default is 'Notify me right away')

- the course needs to be published

- the term start date and course/section start date needs to have passed

This idea is to either do away with the last condition or for more fine-tuned control add an announcement setting that you can check like "send announcement via notification before course start date". The use case for this is that faculty might want to send a welcome or reminder before the first day, or at an institution like ours the students might need to do some reading/watching to be prepared for the official first day of the course.

The faculty could currently get around this by adjusting the course start date, but that may not be allowed at their institution. They could also send a message to students, but then of course the content doesn't persist within the course. 

[jflint1]

I couldn't agree more! We have instructors who need to send announcements to students to tell them about a last-minute classroom shift, or a new orientation exercise on the schedule. It's difficult that they can't send this prior to the first day of classes, i.e., when the term starts.

[jenn_stevens]

It's the season for this to be tripping faculty up again!

We set the course start date to be the week before classes. However, faculty want to send announcements before then. There is nothing that stops them from doing so, and then they are surprised that their students didn't get notifications.

I would definitely support having a "send announcement via notification before course start date" checkbox appear in the course announcements page.

[julietwilhelm]

This would be beneficial to our university as well. 

[ProductPanda]

Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.