Show Global Announcements in Courses

[straussi]

We would like to be able to make Global Announcements appear in the Course Announcements, and especially in the course 'Recent Announcements' when instructors select that option. Further refinements would include limiting to active courses and by sub-account.

Reasoning:  school portals and bookmarks allow students and instructors to directly access their courses, bypassing the Global Announcements on the Dashboard, missing important or even critical information. 

Illustration:  Current Global Announcement

Proposed Global Announcement in Course

[millerjm]

Hi Ira, maybe rename this to "Show Global Announcements in Courses" instead of "Make"

[straussi]

Good suggestion, thanks!

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Thank you for making that change. I was a bit confused about your idea until I read Joni Miller's suggestion and your response. That's another vote up and a share!

[Steven_S]

Global announcements already obscure my entire dashboard, leaving it unused because it would require scrolling past a long list of reoccurring (even after I close them) full screen announcements every time it loads.  Today my dashboard takes 9 full screens of scrolling through global announcements before I can even see the dashboard that is supposed to be a quick view of the status of all my courses.  I cannot support obscuring the home page, or the short list of course specific announcements at the top of the home page in the same way.

Allowing global announcements identical to those on the dashboard to overtake the homepage, will result in either the homepage becoming a page to skip just like the dashboard has already, or else instructors will turn off announcements on the homepage in an effort to retain some student use of that page.

It would be much better to limit global announcements to the dashboard, and have them dispaly only in the same minimized form that instructor announcements appear on the homepage.  That would limit the space announcements take up, and then students and faculty might be able to see and use the dashboard instead of skipping past it.  We might even open announcements with interesting titles from the dashboard, once the announcements were not displayed as spam.  If this idea is applied, global announcements inside courses should be limited to one minimized announcement (appearing as a single line of text, not a full screen image as is happening on the dashboard).  That one announcement could open as a scroll-able list of all open announcements, so that instructor prepared course-specific announcements are not shifted off the home screen by a long list of global announcements.

[straussi]

Steven, interesting to hear your institution uses global announcements that heavily. But globals can already be set to expire, as well as limited to sub-accounts. But I see your point, and an additional checkbox for "Show in Active Courses" might be a limitation that would mitigate your concern.

[Steven_S]

My concern is that offices such as student engagement would take advantage of that checkbox to the detriment of my course.  Based on the current dashboard, that is exactly what they would do.  All of our global announcements are institution wide.  Although they eventually expire, they cannot be dismissed until they expire.  They simply reappear each and every time we turn to the dashboard, hence the comparison to spam.  Those announcements in the long scroll are only the current announcements, but each announcement averages an entire screen in height because the announcements are all built out of images. 

Rather than a check box for admins to chose to force announcements into my course, a check box to allow me to opt in or out of allowing the announcements to show in my own course, would address my concern.  Otherwise, my concern would be most effectively addressed by assigning only one announcement "slot" to global announcements, and limiting what displays on as a link on the home page to a line of text.  As I mentioned, that link could connect to a list of unlimited length showing every announcement that was pushed to the course.

[Jeff_F]

This past week we experienced a notable issue impacting service delivery.  This outage may well be an example where it would be helpful to have a global announcement appear within each course vs. only the dashboard.  Another example may be the open issue with Chrome 96 not loading pages.  

Perhaps a solution could be something such as @straussi suggests here.  With that approach an admin created announcement would be created in active courses.

Or perhaps the solution could be a single line toward the top of the page.  This could provide a brief statement and a link to the more detailed information. You know, something just like the Canvas Community.  Below is a banner announcement in place that appears on all pages, which is exactly what I came to the community to suggest for Canvas courses.  🤔   

Perhaps add an x so the viewer could close it.

Example Banner

[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.