[Direct Share] Share Content with Multiple Individuals
As my college’s Instructional Designer, I share my college’s branded Canvas course template and other templates with faculty through Canvas Commons. In doing this, I need to provide faculty with instructions and motivate them to go to Commons to find and import items.
Problem #1 is that some faculty get overwhelmed with Canvas Commons and give up if they don’t figure it out right away.
Problem #2 is that the more user-friendly option, which is the Canvas Direct Share feature, only allows me to send to one user at a time. When I Direct Share with individual users who request items, it works well for them because it’s right there in their account. The problem is that it is prohibitively labor intensive for me to Direct Share items with all faculty or groups of faculty.
My proposed solution is to add to the Direct Share feature the option to send to multiple users and groups of users, much like the Canvas Inbox does. Examples of groups in this situation might be all faculty in the college, all faculty in a department, and so on. Why this feature? With this feature, I could send templates directly to users and eliminate their need to go find the templates in Commons. By getting the template directly in their account, more faculty are likely to use the templates. Another use for this new feature might be for a department chair to share department-specific content with all faculty in that department. As for permissions, the local Canvas administrator could create and manage Direct Share groups and also be able to activate the other users’ ability to create Direct Share groups as needed. The Canvas administrator could also manage who has permission to Direct Share to which groups.
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