Notifications

  • Check your Notifications settings before working with live Canvas courses, particularly if you intend to use Canvas regularly to communicate with students.
  • Advise students to check their settings, so that they can receive timely notifications. Emphasize that they should NOT deactivate notifications for key communication tools, such as Announcements, to avoid missing important information. 
  • Sometimes University systems may add an additional email address for you (e.g. college email, dept email, external email). If you start receiving repeated notifications to your multiple email addresses, please go into Account > Notifications and change your notification preferences for each of your email addresses (see further details on the page below). 

You can add further email addresses to your account, in order to receive notifications there (e.g. your college or private email address).

To add an additional email address:

  1. Click Account from the Global Navigation menu.
  2. Click Settings.
  3. On the top right-hand side of your screen, select + Email address.
  4. Add your secondary email address.
  5. You will need to respond to the message that will be sent to your additional email address.

NOTE: Your default email address is indicated by a star.

Notification preferences allow you to select how and when you want to be notified when various events occur within a course. There are two levels of notifications: account level (affects all your courses); and course level (granular settings within one particular course).

Index

  1. Account-level notification preferences
  2. Course-level notification preferences

1. Account-level notification preferences

Please see also generic Canvas documentation: How do I manage notifications for my account? Links to an external site.

Notification preferences at your account level apply to all courses in which you are enrolled and are automatically passed down to each course. See the next section for how to change granular course-level notification preferences.

At the account level there is a dropdown box where you can opt to change notification settings for a particular course, without having to access the course itself:

 

You can control the frequency of receiving notifications when changes or updates occur in the following five areas:

  • Course activities 
  • Discussions
  • Conversations (Inbox messages)
  • Scheduling
  • Groups

    Managing your notifications

  • Select Account from the global navigation menu.
  • Select Notifications from the available options. 
  • The categories are listed on the left-hand side, and beside each activity you can choose from four types of notification preferences:

    1. Notify me immediately (bell icon): ensures that you are immediately notified of changes in the corresponding area.
    2. Send daily summary (single date calendar icon): you will receive a daily update on all notifications. Daily notifications are received at 18:00 each day
    3. Send weekly summary (calendar icon): provides notifications in the corresponding area once weekly. If you scroll down to the end of the page you can read a summary of when your weekly notifications will be sent.
    4. Notifications off (bell icon with a line through): deactivate notifications for the corresponding item/area in Canvas. Choosing this means you will not receive any notifications for that particular activity.
  • Apply the required changes to your Account Notification preferences.

2. Course-level notification preferences

Please see also generic Canvas guidance:

Notifications can be managed at the course level. This will create an override of these preferences at the corresponding account level. Preferences for that course must then continue to be managed manually within the course.

Go to the Home Page in a particular course and select View Course Notifications:

This screen allows you to manage notifications to all the communication channels that you have enabled via Account > Settings.

  • Calendar icon: notify me via a weekly (or daily) summary
  • No entry icon: notifications are unsupported
  • Green bell icon: notifiy me immediately
  • Bell icon with a line through: notifications are turned off

Click on an icon to change it:

Note: System-generated emails cannot be 'opted-out' of, or switched off; e.g. Enrolment notifications (once per course), Password reset, Account changes, etc.