[ARCHIVED] Group Notifications

[lhenson]

As the Dist Admin, I am wanting to create student groups at the account level for our campuses.  We are wanting to use these groups to post information to the students such as upcoming testing dates, reminders, etc. since you can't do that any other way except through a group or course.  How will the group members be informed that there is something new posted?  I tested it somewhat and didn't find anything that looked promising, but maybe I overlooked something.  The group announcements will be useless unless it notifies the members that it is there.  This happens for courses, but what about groups?

[brueckert]

Hi  @lhenson ,

Can you clarify the structure of how students are enrolled? It sounds like a regular course would work for the purpose you described. We have advisory/enrichment courses for our students. Advisors use it to post announcements and calendar events that don't apply to the students' academic courses. To students, it looks and functions just like their other courses, they simply don't receive a grade for it. Once I get the College Counselors trained in Canvas, they will use it to post college visit info and reminders about forms, applications etc. It sounds like you are wanting to establish a similar process.

[lhenson]

I currently have courses set up for each campus so a handful of people can post information to it.  I populate these courses with an SIS import.  I also created sections within the course for each grade level.  The only part of this situation that I don't like is the fact that you can't post announcements to individual sections, so I thought I would try the group setup instead, but it still sounds like the course option might be the best option.  Maybe a feature which allows for announcements for sections is on the horizon.

[brueckert · Accepted solution]

Announcements by section would certainly be a nice addition. This is likely the culture of the students at our school, but we've found that students don't view announcements as consistently as their Canvas Calendar, so our faculty have gotten out of the habit of using them; they create calendar events or no-submission dummy assignments instead in order to populate the students' calendars, both of which can be selectively released to individual sections. I'm not making this suggestion, as I would like to change that culture at my school, but this is what has worked for us in the past.