No profile picture with copied course announcements

[troyer_59]

I have a class where the instructor copied everything from one course into another. Something that did NOT copy was the profile picture associated with his Announcements. I copied some announcements from one into another and I'm seeing the same thing. In the picture, "Scheduled Announcment" was made fresh in the course while "Delayed Posting - 1:28 PM" and "Guest Lecturer February 23" were copied in.

I've tried editing the copied announcements to see if that pulls the profile picture but it does not. 

The profile picture is also not a part of the editable HTML code. Other than deleting and re-adding them, any other thoughts?

[troyer_59]

FWIW, I also tried deleting the announcements that had no profile picture and "undeleting" them and no dice.

[abunag · Accepted solution]

Many schools use a master-course model (or blueprint model) where a course is designed by an Instructional Designer, then is copied into course shells for each instructor for that course.  Since the ID isn't the instructor, their information is removed from course content when it's copied to prevent student confusion.  The only way to "fix" this is to copy the announcement content into a new announcement and post it.

[pjonas1]

That is not a solution. It's just a confirmation that the problem exists.

[Chris_Hofer]

@pjonas1 ...

I don't know that I would consider this a problem...IMHO.  The scenario that @abunag outlined is a good one.  When copying content, I wouldn't want another instructor's picture on announcements in my course.  Although I might want to keep some of the announcements from the other instructor, I would want to post my own announcements.  If you have a sandbox course, you could keep a copy of each announcement in that course and then just copy them in (or copy/paste) as needed...which would solve the issue of the profile picture not displaying correctly.

Hope this helps a bit.

[pjonas1]

The picture gets stripped even if you are copying from your own course with a matching instructor ID. Which is already a bit lazy on Instructure’s part but not the end of the world. 

What users have been complaining about, for years, is that you can’t restore the picture. It would be easy enough to put an option for that in the ellipsis menu. 

Instead, you have to copy-and-paste every subject and every message body for every announcement in every course every semester again and again to have a professional looking message. 

[S_Jones2501]

Canvas PLEASE fix this. IT IS NOT SOLVED! From 2017-2025 we are still talking about this!!

I have 6 courses with a required 30 announcements EACH, every 5 weeks. Do the math on that copying and pasting, it's a ridiculous time waster!! They are MY announcements from MY courses, but don't keep MY picture when copying into new shells, or importing content into new shells.  This should not be that difficult!

[clue21]

One of the reasons Canvas is so popular is the reduced cost. When something is open source, the company is less motivated to correct non-technical issues. Therefore, a college can develop its tools to accomplish what everybody asks in this post.

[fritzmichele]

I re-use my announcements from term to term.  Much of the content is similar--reminders about upcoming assignments, tests, and so forth.  The "U" in the circle is very annoying.  It seems to me that when I edit the announcement to change the date to display it, the software should put my profile picture into the announcement if there is none.

This is still a bug.

--Michele Fritz (De Anza College)

[ehouswor]

I completely agree - it should at least be an option to push your own profile picture forward. I am adding my profile image to the start of the announcement to compensate. 

[annespinoza]

This is dumb. So I have to keep retyping the announcement or copy/paste to each course/hour every semester or else deal with the anonymous U ? 

[dspiel]

Would be nice if they saw the importance/value of fixing this so that a tool could be used and work.

[clue21]

If an instructor modifies an announcement, it should post with the instructor's name. (Otherwise, it falsely indicates that it was a standardized announcement). Yes, copying and pasting the content into a new announcement works, but if one is teaching six classes with the same three announcements in each class, that makes 18 times copying and pasting. Additionally, counting copying and pasting the subject would make 36 times copying and pasting because there is no way to copy the message and subject with one action.

[pjonas1]

Please just give us an option in the ellipsis menu of each announcement to (re-)attach our profile picture.

Listen to your users.

[may027]

This is not solved and the original post was in 2017. Copy/paste of announcements is a real hassle.

This should really be addressed by Instructure.