Tailor Announcements to specific sections or groups

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

 

It would be useful to have the ability to tailor Announcements to specific sections or groups in a course.

 

Comments from Instructure

 

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14284-canvas-production-release-notes-2018-03-10 .

52 Comments
biray
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

I believe some of these functions already exist in Canvas from various interfaces:

The last 2 items are more related to custom messages by group and/or by section. But if the goal is to alert specific groups of students and send out a custom message, these functionalities exist.

Does that help? If not, can you be a bit more specific with a use-case scenario when this feature would be beneficial to a teacher's workflow?

Smiley Happy

applem
Community Contributor

It is the way Announcements are displayed in the course versus going to the Inbox.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Hi  @applem ​

It's great to know that we're narrowing down what it is you are seeking.  Are you wanting the announcements to display differently?  If so, what is your vision for that?

James_Kocher_UF
Community Champion

I definitely see the usefulness in this feature. We have many courses with different sections, especially with labs.  It would be nice to be able to send a section specific announcement out, like "lab is cancelled!" without having to do it through the inbox.   That way, a lead instructor can also monitor what is going on with the sub sections. With doing this in the inbox, that is just not possible!

hpalmersheim
Community Novice

I agree.  It is nice that we can differentiate assignments, I would like to be able to do the same thing with announcements.  We have several teachers that cross list courses and end up with several sections. 

jordan
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Thank you all for your feedback! I changed the title of this feature request from "Limit Announcements to specific section, groups" to "Tailor Announcements to specific sections or groups" and as this feature was originally submitted before our last cutoff, we will add it into the current voting period, from May 5th - August 5th.

jbuchner
Community Contributor

I create groups for my sections, (something that used to be slightly easier when you could create groups where all the members had to be linked to the same section) and then make announcements to each section as needed. To jump to group pages quickly, I bookmark the homepage of each group for quick access. It works reasonably well for my classes with 15/16 sections of twenty students each.

dperpich
Community Participant

All native tools should be section-aware.  Students should be able to easily see all the course specific announcements (all-class and section specific) in one place.  Navigating over to Groups is a rabbit hole that should have to be entered into.

jbuchner
Community Contributor

I don't think that the students have to navigate over to groups to see group announcements. They should either appear on the User Dashboard, Inbox, and/or email box, depending on how they have notifications set up or how they are getting to their courses. And even if they have to navigate over to their groups to see a specific announcement, they aught to be able to get to the groups in one click from the Courses and Groups Drop down menu.

dperpich
Community Participant

Thanks for taking the time to comment, John. Can you share with me a screenshot where a student is seeing all-class and also section-specific announcements on the same screen?

diana perpich | mlibrary learning + teaching | university of michigan