Did my students see my announcement?

[dmbaird]

Is there a way to see if a student saw an announcement?  Are there statistics showing how many of the students in a course saw an announcement?

[garth]

One way to check is to use student view, see this document:

What is Student View? | Canvas Instructor Guide | Canvas Guide

I just posted an announcement in a test course, then used "Student View" and was able to see the announcement.

Let us know if this works for you.

[dmbaird]

I can see it.  I want to know if a student opened the announcement and read it (or watched a video announcement), similar to the page view stats.

[kona · Accepted solution]

I just checked and you can see that the students clicked on the Announcements page/index, but not if they viewed a specific announcement; see image below of how it looks. To get to this screen go to the People link (on left in course), click on the name of a student, and then click on the "Access Report" button on the right side of the page. From the front end/Instructor side of Canvas this is the most you can see - the last time an individual student clicked on the announcement page. And no, there are no statistics on the number or percent of students who viewed it.

[kona]

PS - I just came across this recently submitted Canvas Feature Idea​ - that seems similar to what you want - . It's not open for voting yet, but my recommendation is to comment on it and follow it so you'll know when it's available and you can vote on it!

[dmbaird]

I also discovered that:

• Make your announcement a video announcement;
• place it in Kaltura,
• Imbed Kaltura video in the announcement; then
• you can get analytics of video views from Kaltura itself.

[KendallDinniene]

Wondering if in the six years since this was posted Canvas has actually given instructors the ability to see whether students have viewed a particular announcement, and especially if there is a way to do so more efficiently than clicking through every student on the roster?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello @KendallDinniene ...

I'm not *entirely* sure on this, but it might be worth looking into...  Have you tried looking at the New Analytics "Reports" area of Canvas?  There is a "Course Activity" report that *might* have this information in it...though I'm not 100% sure of this.

How do I view and download reports in New Analytic... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Hopefully this will have the data you are looking for, but again, I'm not 100% sure.

[TONY-ROME]

It is now 2024 and, still, Canvas hasn't solved this problem yet. I don't want to sound "rude" but this predicament has been around since 2016. Blackboard® Ultra has this ability. At the very least, it tells you how many students have accessed each announcement and displays that info on the right side of the announcement title as a fraction — how many students accessed over total number of students. It appears that Canvas does not see this as a priority because it enjoys being the favorite of Ivy League schools. Tell me I'm wrong. It's only a simple script edit. How hard can it be?

[chriscas]

Hi @TONY-ROME,

While this is a relatively simple idea in theory, it gets complicated pretty quickly when getting into the the details...

The thing that I feel is the biggest inhibitor to this functionality (I know myself and others have discussed this in past threads on the topic) is that users can get notifications of an announcement via email, and those notifications are often the entire announcement.  Canvas also has the ability to add announcements to the "home page" of a course.  You may ask why these features matter in this conversation...  It comes down to being able to track which users have open/seen something.  The data about students who viewed an announcement directly in the UI should definitely be there.  Tracking who viewed notification emails (which oftentimes are the announcement) is much harder and would probably be a frowned upon practice in general.  Then with the home page announcements, those probably should be counted, but you could argue for a "no" to that depending how long the announcement was and whether you think students read that section of the home page pr not.

With these complications (and there could be more I'm not even thinking about currently), the number Canvas would provide is unlikely to actually reflect the reality of how many students really read the announcement.  Maybe you would just like an wild estimate, but others would likely not be happy about that.  It would also likely go down the slippery slope of further requests asking for data about which students read or did not read, and that becomes super problematic, as some teachers may even start to grade based on that.

Overall, my feeling as a Canvas admin for higher-ed is that while having accurate info on this would be very helpful, the technology doesn't really make that very possible at the moment.  Until there would be a way to get more accurate data, I feel like it's better to not even go down this road.  This is just my personal opinion though, and I'm sure others will disagree with me.  I wanted to put this out here to show the situation may not be as easy as it first looks.

-Chris