Are my students seeing my Canvas announcements?

Dear Aggie,

I do my best to keep my students up to date about upcoming assignments, quizzes and discussions by posting frequent announcements in Canvas, but I still have students telling me that they didn’t know something was due. Are they not seeing the announcements?

~Invisible Announcements

Dear Invisible,

I know it can be frustrating when important information appears not to be reaching students. Making sure that students have all the information they need to be successful in the course is part of your instructor presence. (See this Dear Aggie post from January 26, 2023 for more on instructor presence.) I have a few suggestions about announcements, and then another way to remind students of upcoming deadlines.

Students can (and should!) set their Canvas notifications so that announcements are forwarded to their e-mail "right away." Here is a link that describes how to do this. I include this in my syllabus, as well as the Getting Started Module, and show them how to do it in a course introduction screencast.

You can also consider putting the most recent announcement(s) on your course page, so that students see them when they log into your course. You can do this through the Settings link in the left-hand course toolbar.

Finally, if you really want to remind students of upcoming deadlines, you can use a Gradebook feature to e-mail all students who haven’t yet submitted an assignment or quiz. I do this around noon on days that have something due at 11:59pm. One note: the default message subject line is somewhat "impersonal", so I always change it to something a little friendlier, like "Friendly reminder about the Biol 1120 quiz" or "Please don’t forget the Biol 1120 quiz". These messages will go to their Canvas inbox (which they can also forward to their e-mail through notifications for "conversation messages"). Here is a page that describes how to send these kinds of messages from the gradebook.

I hope this helps make your announcements a little more visible, and will help your students keep track of due dates.

~Aggie