Announcements

The Announcements tool is intended primarily for teachers or course administrators to send notices to students enrolled on a Canvas course – announcements are sent automatically by email to all course participants (unless individuals have disallowed such notifications in their own Account > Notifications settings).
Announcements can be posted to all students, or sub-sets of students (if Sections have been defined in the course).
It is possible to allow replies to (comments on) an announcement, or at a later point in time, to disable replies (comments) for existing announcement (see below).

Index

Creating announcements
Viewing announcements
Enabling replies (comments) on announcements
Locking (or unlocking) replies (comments) on announcements
More information on the Announcements tool

1. Creating Announcements

Announcements can be accessed via the Course Navigation menu on the left-hand side. To create a new announcement, click on the + Announcement blue box and complete the fields on the next screen. You can set an Available From date and time and an Until date and time.

If no Until date is set, the announcement remains visible.

If an announcement needs to be updated later, click 'Edit' from the three-dots drop-down menu. After saving an edited announcement, a modal window will appear giving you the option to either save without notifying students, or to send a notification to students.

2. Viewing Announcements

It is worth exploring how announcements are received, as this tool can be used frequently once teaching gets underway. For students, alerts to new announcements can appear in a few places. These include:

a) The course title when viewing the Dashboard in 'card view' (the default and recommended way of viewing the Dashboard):

extract from a course tile showing the announcement icon and a new item

b) In the To Do list on the right-hand side of the specific course page.

c) In the Announcement tool itself (located on the Course Navigation menu).

d) As an email received from notifications@instructure.com, which should have 'New announcement: [Course Title]' in the email title. Note that if students have adjusted their notifications preferences, they might not receive an alert via this method.

e) As a lock-screen notification on a mobile device if using the Canvas student app.

3. Enabling replies (comments) on announcements

By default, the option to enable comments by course participants in Canvas courses at Oxford is available. You can check the status of this option in your particular course by selecting Settings, click more options, then view the announcement options provided:

If comments are not disabled across the course, then you can enable participant comments (replies) when creating a new annoucement:

Note: When course participants reply to an announcement, their reply will go to all course participants. The teacher's original email announcement contains a warning to this effect: "Replies to this email will be posted as a reply to the announcement, which will be seen by everyone in the course".

4. Locking (or unlocking) replies (comments) on announcements

A teacher or course administrator can choose to lock an announcement (to prevent any further replies), or unlock an announcement (to enable replies, if not done so on creation of the announcement). Click the three dots menu alongside the relevant announcement. You can also select multiple announcements, and then use the lock/unlock icon that applies to all of them.