Canvas Reverts Immediate E-Mail Notifications to Daily Reports

[MeEtThioether]

I am a Learning Assistant (Undergraduate Teaching Assistant) for a course. As a Teaching Assistant, Canvas sends me several notifications for Student Submissions. Because I want to have a record of Student Submissions, I created an e-mail rule to send these notifications to a specific folder. In contrast, I leave Announcement Notifications within my inbox and try to open them as soon as possible. Canvas decided to disrespect my Notification Settings again by sending me a Daily Report of all my notifications. When checking my Notification Settings, None of my notifications were set to daily. I wind up missing Announcements from my courses because they are all after several lines of Submission Notifications. Is it at all possible for Canvas to respect my Notification Settings, or do I need to become even more paranoid about missing important notifications if I do not log into Canvas several times each hour?

EDIT: I unflagged the Community Coach's replies as the solution since I had yet to submit a ticket to my University's ITS team. I now submitted the ticket, and I will unmark my reply as the solution if my University's ITS team claims it is a Canvas Issue or outside of their jurisdiction. 

[chriscas]

Hi @MeEtThioether,

Your screenshot shows your account level notifications, which would be the default for courses, but there are also course-level notification settings which would override your acount options.  In the screenshot, you can select the a specific course in the :settings for" dropdown box to see if perhaps the course has different settings and then adjust from there.  I will also say that I believe once you change settings to immediate that you may get more more summary email during the next scheduled send with the info form the time period between the last summary email and the change to immediate.  The How do I manage my Canvas notification settings? - Instructure Community - 615326 guide covers this is pretty good detail.

Hope this info helps!

-Chris

[MeEtThioether]

Thank you for your reply, and I apologise for not including my Course-Specific Notifications as well. They contain the same Course-Acitivites Notifications as my Account-Level Notifications. While I understand Canvas may take some time to process my changes, I do not understand why Canvas decides to revert my notification settings back to Daily Summary for all notifications. I had this issue during the Fall 2024 Semester, when I initially made my Account-Level Notification Adjustments to the first Screenshot I provided, and I ran into this issue again in Late December 2024 and now. Do you know if Canvas uses automatic software that monitors how often e-mail notifications are read and adjusts the frequency of notifications accordingly?

[chriscas]

Hi @MeEtThioether,

I have set up notification preferences on multiple different user accounts, and I have never experienced those settings changing on their own.  This might be a question to ask your school/institution Canvas team (usually in the eLearning / IT / Digital Education areas).  It's possible your local team is resetting accounts or notifications for some reason, causing your issue.  I'm pretty confident it's not a system-wide issue with Canvas, though it's pretty much imporrible to say that 100% for sure.

Hope this helps a bit more!

-Chris

[MeEtThioether]

Thank you for your reply. The only other complaint I read online similar to my issue was from one student from a different Institution, so your assumption may be right. I will make sure to ask my school's IT team about my issue and update my question accordingly.

[ARD2]

Sounds like a bug with the notification preferences. Also, this is how I feel when I use Canvas: "what am I not seeing, what is hidden from me, what will I realize I should have seen when it's too late?"

[MeEtThioether]

I hope it is just a bug and not some kind of Javascript tracker that thinks it knows better than the users who set up their notification preferences. Canvas also has the issue of automatically correcting HTML to making it more bloated, but that is common to many WYSIWYG editors and not as detrimental as not receiving important course announcements.