Disable Student Ability to Create Group Announcements

[justin_keene]

We are creating a "Student Body Home" course for all 2700 of the students in our school.  The goal is to have a central location for resources along with some accountability pieces, such as an Honor Code quiz.  We also wanted to utilize announcements and make it so they went to the specific grade levels.  To accomplish this, we created groups.

We ran into a big potential issue.  When the students go to the Announcements page for the specific group, they are able to create announcements.  I cannot seem to find a way to turn this off.   Is there a way to change this so students can only view the announcement for the group they belong to?

Thanks for your help.

- Justin Keene

[rconroy · Accepted solution]

Hi  @justin_keene , 

This is a good opportunity for a Feature Idea (see https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-1330-how-do-i-create-a-new-feature-idea?sr=search&searchId=...‌ in the https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas?sr=search&searchId=0809bb76-d690-4b68-a891-e7dd4e662...‌) I've searched the documentation and tested it in my own sandbox. I don't see a way to be able to disable this feature at this time. Since the Feature Idea process can sometimes take a while to get people on board with, in the immediate I'd suggest trying to create different courses for each grade instead of doing groups if you can't trust the students to post appropriately. You can potentially also enroll multiple teachers into your course, divide them into the groups and have them moderate the announcements for inappropriate content. 

We do sections for our courses. So if we have an ENG101 course, we'll do ENG101_2 after the first one reaches its capacity, and so on. That might be another work around for you if you decide not to do moderators. 

Sorry there isn't an immediate fix, but luckily there is always a work around! Hopefully something works out for you!

[justin_keene]

Thanks for the suggestion.  It is good advice and I will add it soon.

I did see that there is work being done on adding announcements to sections.  That will help solve this issue as well.

- Justin

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi  @justin_keene ...

I thought that I would check in with you because there hasn't been much activity in this thread since August 24th.  It looks like you and Deactivated user have had a good conversation about your question, and I was wondering if you felt this question could be marked "Correct"?  If so, please go ahead and mark Roxanne's response as such.  However, if you have any outstanding question for the Canvas Community as it relates to your above question, please post them below.  For now, since we've not had any new activity in this thread for quite a while, I am going to mark your question as "Assumed Answered", but that won't prevent you or others from posting additional questions/comments below.  I hope that's alright with you, Justin.  Looking forward to hearing back from you soon.

[LianneLindsey]

I would like to have the option to disable student-created announcements when using groups in Canvas to encourage face-to-face interaction when appropriate.

[EBrinkman]

I had an instructor request this also (disable student ability to create group announcements).