Display most recent announcements on a Page

[nathan-swailes]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

     

  Idea open for vote Wed. August 3, 2016 - Wed. November 2, 2016  Learn more about voting...

Having set up an informative home page that displays all the important course information when students open the course, the only thing that is missing is the most recent announcement(s) displayed. A small horizontal widget bar would be ideal and could be placed under the course title or at the top of the page.

Announcements are vital to the running of a course, reminding students of a  room change, to bring something with them to a certain session etc. While they can subscribe to receive announcements to their email or subscribe to the rss feed (which are both encouraged), it would make so much sense to have the most recent important announcement appear on the Home Page too. This most recent announcement would be visible immediately to all users when the student opens the course, without having to navigate to the announcements page.

I have tried displaying the announcement RSS feed in an iframe on the home page, which seemed like the perfect solution, but unfortunately Chrome and Firefox (not sure about Safari) don't automatically support this without add-ons - only IE does. So that wont work for 95% of students.

I am certain students would find this useful and instructors would feel much more confident that their most recent message is reaching everyone if it is front and center, regardless of whether a student forgot to visit the announcement page or did not subscribe to an rss feed or email announcements visit the announcement page.

Maybe there is already a widget out there that I am missing that will fill this gap. Or other solutions or ideas out there to solve this?

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-01-07)

[scottdennis]

Hello Nathan,

Thank you for taking the time to submit this feature idea.  Many people would like to see Announcements get a facelift and this is something that our Product team is evaluating and prioritizing with other competing projects.   is one feature idea that came close to 100 votes.   and both received fewer votes but the associated comments tell of an unmet need.

Because the previous related submissions did not reach 100 votes I will open this idea with the cohort starting today.

[kmeeusen]

Hi Nathan:

Until your idea comes to fruition, have a look as this great work-round Create an Announcements Box on your Course Home Page

I hope this helps, and I have added this to everyone of my courses.

KLM

[nathan-swailes]

Hi  @kmeeusen ,

Thanks for the suggestion! I have actually been following this work-around discussion for a while and tried to get our IT team to implement the code needed so i could add this tweak (but to no avail). It is a wonderful idea to plug this gap in displaying announcements (especially important or most recent ones) front and center on a homepage but it was unfortunately a non starter for me. I also still want to use the announcement feature as it currently operates so students are subscribed and can visit announcements. Manually adding a duplicate announcement to a text box on the home page is a good intermediate fix but I'd definitely be happy if a permanent widget were available. The other ingenious idea posted on the same thread by ishar-uw​ about using the RSS feed and displaying it using an iframe on the home page also did not work for me (I was so excited for it to work as it looked ideal) - there appears to be RSS feed and browser compatibility issues that make it unreliable for some users (it does not display on all browsers all of the time). It is clear that there is interest in displaying these types of notices on a home page. If you are interested in having your workaround operate as a universally compatible feature that ties in with the current announcements I encourage you to up vote

Thanks!

-NS

[kmeeusen]

Nathan:

First, you do not need the IT intervention if you are willing to use the HTML editor in a Canvas page. There is no need to add anything to the global account files, simply paste the HTML code for the message box into the HTML editor for your home page.

If it is any consolation, I did vote for your idea! I have always wanted announcement front and center in a course. While using HTML is rather easy, many won't touch that editor if their life depended on it

KLM

[nathan-swailes]

Hi Kelley,

Sorry about my miscommunication, when I mentioned editing the global account files, I was referring to Emily Frank's code over here. that stemmed from the discussion you started - I meant to tag that post in my reply. Thanks for sharing your ideas and starting that discussion as it has been so helpful as a new Canvas user. I love that as course directors we now have freedom to play with the html and create wonderful interactive courses for our students. It has opened up a new world of possibility that previous course management software prevented me from exploring fully. I am sure that if others, like you, checked out the html editor and tried out some simple coding they would start having way too much fun creating their courses.

Thanks again!!

NS

[mpilati]

While I am thankful for the work-around that Community members shared with me, it would be really awesome to not have a work around and just be able to quickly add something that is just like the widgets that have been developed - without 10 steps and dealing with HTML. Please vote this up!

[cward]

Hi all,

Thank you for this suggestion, and for voting and commenting. We've created a ticket in our backlog for this, and although I can't provide a timeframe for when this will become available, know it's something we're definitely interested in doing soon.

Chris

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in development

[rkelley1]

For those interested, here's a work around to add announcements to a homepage, by using Feedwind, which relies upon RSS and an iframe.  Below is an example and the steps used.  It has worked for me with Google Chrome and Explorer.  If others try it, I'd like to hear your feedback.

Thanks,

Robert

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Example of Announcements on Your Home Page (Using RSS, Feedwind, & HTML)

Steps for Inserting Announcements into Your Home Page (Using RSS & HTML)

• First, you need to create an minimum of one announcement
  1. Open your course
  2. Click on Announcements
  3. Click create announcement (if you don't already have one)
  4. Once you've created an announcement view your course in student view
  5. Once in the student view open the announcement tab
  6. Right click on the RSS icon & select "copy link address"
  7. Paste link into notepad, you will need it for the next steps.

• Second, go to Feedwind
  1. Create your free account (e.g., can login with Facebook or Google); otherwise, may impact results below
  2. Paste the link into the 'Feed URL' box on the left hand side
  3. Click the 'Plus' button (to the right of where you pasted the URL)
  4. Adjust General Settings to suit (e.g., set height to 395; keep width as 'responsive')
  5. Click the green 'Get Code' at the top right of the page
  6. Click on the 'Try this if it doesn't work' link
  7. Click on the bottom 'Copy Code' button
  8. Paste the code into a safe place to keep it temporarily (e.g., Notepad or Word app)

• Go to your Canvas Home Page (or anywhere else you wish to add the announcements)
  1. Edit the page (e.g., Home Page)
  2. Place a row of x's where you'd like the announcements to go (e.g., xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
  3. Switch the HTML by clicking on the link 'HTML Editor'
  4. !! Copy all of the HTML code and paste it somewhere as a backup of your existing page (e.g., in the Notepad or Word app).
  5. Copy the Feedwind code (from wherever you temporarily stored it)
  6. Highlight the row of x's (e.g., xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) on the Canvas page (in HTML view), and paste over it the Freedwind code. (e.g., then, in rich text editor view, drag and resize the Announcement box to 400 and width to 640; note, the announcements width will still shrink to accommodate smaller screens if width was set to 'responsive' on Feedwind)
  7. Save the page

First note:  In addition to making a copy of the HTML for your entire Canvas page...   I'd recommend also saving the HTML code below wherever you post the announcements, and then after you save the page, re-open it, go into HTML view, and then paste that HTML code below the announcement.  This is helpful, because the code below the announcements will likely be removed when Canvas 'cleans the HTML' code.

Second note: After you paste in the HTML code for the announcements, and are back in the 'Rich Content Editor' view, you may need to resize the announcements; if you make it larger than 640 in height (e.g., 660), you'll remove one of the vertical scroll bars on the right hand side.

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