[Notifications] Temporary course notification pause - by the instructor

[petern]

As a teacher, you may want to do add lots of assignments or import assignments from Canvas Commons.  When making lots of changes to a live course, each new piece of content can trigger a notification for students.  These high-frequency notifications at my institution caused students to block all Canvas notifications.

Instead, it would be useful for instructors to "pause" or "mute" any outgoing notifications for an hour.  This means that they can do lots of edits to a course and import assignments knowing that students will not be notified immediately.  At the end of the hour, a summary of the changes could be sent as a notification to students.  

I'm aware that students can customise notifications on a per-course level.  But I think this is different.

The pause notifications period doesn't have to be an hour.  Could be any length of time.  

[abrannontx]

Problem statement:

I work at a large University in Texas and support our use of Non-Academic Canvas (I am an instructor, designer, and admin). These courses are for internal trainings, professional development, certificate-based trainings, and anything that is not for academic credit. Several are tied to the catalog and issued certificates. We constantly need to update and adapt courses based on new information, laws, regulations, policies, and procedures. However, we do not require previous participants to go back and complete the new modules. I know the go-to for Canvas is to allow users to control their notifications, but in our experience, this creates stress, confusion, and frustration with our faculty, staff, and students. As we publish new modules, certain users get multiple notifications depending on how many edits we make. In addition, several of our courses have automation paired with it, meaning our users complete the course and access is granted to a particular application. So simply creating a new canvas course is not easily feasible. For example, we have courses that all faculty and staff must go through to gain access to TimeclockPlus, our timekeeping application. Hundreds, if not a thousand plus, are in some of these courses, but timekeeping procedures can change and the course will need to be updated. The last time we did this, anyone with notifications on got 7 emails, since all seven modules had to be updated. Employees that hadn't had to take the course in years flooded our department panicked because they thought they had to take the course again. Creating unnecessary work for our small department.

Proposed solution:

To alleviate the unnecessary stress, confusion, and frustration, notifications should be a setting within each course that can be turned off or customized. This fix would help us tremendously

User role(s):

admin,instructor,designer