Users need to be able to customize notifications at the course level

[curtain]

As a user, I want to be able to keep frequent notifications enabled for courses that have high interaction, that I am more invested in, or I find important.  I want to be able to 'down-tune' or disable notifications for courses that have a lot of activity but not much interaction, courses that I am involved in as a staff member, or by my role in the institution involved in but not participating in so I do not receive notifications that I will end up ignoring and then also miss important notifications.

If the premise of Canvas Notifications is to keep me engaged in courses and informed about my courses, I need to be able to control that at a course level for it to be valuable to me and not just a 'firehose' of information.  If I cannot control it more granularity, I may turn all Notifications off and then miss something I actually did want to know about.

Note from the Community Team:https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/3663-notifications-by-course also requests this capability. We consider combined support for both ideas as part of our regular prioritization process.

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For details, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-18579-canvas-release-notes-2020-04-18 .

[canvas_admin]

notifications definitely need to be more granular.  Beyond the course level, i would like it differentiated between discussions and assignments rather than grouping everything under "submission."   I want assignment submission notifications, but not graded discussion submission notifications.

[SethBattis]

And, by the same token, I'd love to be able to administratively reset all users' notification settings at the beginning of the year to some reasonable default… and possibly lock some settings (e.g. announcements via email can't be shut off, or something draconian like that).

[tdelillo]

I also think it would be nice to be able to lock some notifications. I feel like that is a fairly separate idea, though. More like this one?

[r_v_jones]

This is something I believe is long overdue.

I have lost count of the number of staff who are enrolled on several courses but have switched off notifications because of feeling swamped by notification messages.

If the notifications can be setup so they are course specific it would be of great benefit to course teams.

Thanks

Rob

[hvaughn]

I think instructors would like to be able to control when notifications are sent from their courses as well.  Too often, when something is changed in a course, a notification is sent out without the instructor realizing it, and results in mild panic for some students.  For example an instructor recently moved an assignment from one weighted group into another.  Doing so sent out an email to all students that the grading policy for the course had changed.  When too many notifications are sent, often, after a while, the response is to ignore them.

[anthonem]

At our institution, we have some large-enrollment course sites (i.e. Math placement exam), and we would really like the ability to administratively control default email notification settings for these types of courses.

[buellj]

This would be a huge help for non-academic uses of Canvas. We have several high-enrollment courses that could potentially drown out legitimate notifications from regular courses, so it would be handy to have tools to mitigate that.

[rjacklin]

I echo this sentiment! As an elementary school and middle school parents/observers tend to get nervous when things like that change.

[kblack]

An excellent point!  I wonder if that should be a separate feature request.  We have many faculty who complain about the notifications that get sent out when they'd rather they not be sent out.

[csalazar]

Making a user's notification preferences editable at the course level would provide users the flexibility they need to manage the volume of notifications they receive. After reviewing how this change would be implemented, it became clear that it would require a significant change to the architecture of notifications. Right now notifications are managed at the user level which control a user's experience throughout Canvas. Making this a setting at the course level is a large effort. This is a feature we hope to deliver in the future, but it is not something that we will be able to work on in the next six months.