Skip to Main Content

Educational Technology: Tech Tips Tuesdays Archive

Educational Technology at Columbia College

Tech Tips Tuesdays: Canvas Notifications

by Jesika Brooks on 2024-01-16T10:30:00-05:00 | 0 Comments

A header graphic reading "Tech Tips Tuesdays." There is a laptop sitting at an angle. It is purple and bright green, with a green display on its monitor. The background has ones and zeroes floating as code, along with a purple circuit line snaking behind the text.

Good morning,

With so much activity going on in your courses, it’s good to get notified when students submit work, post to discussions, and so on. Likewise, if you’ve been added to courses in a supervisory role, you might be getting notified too much!

Today we’ll briefly look at notifications in Canvas.

By default, notifications in Canvas go to your Columbia College e-mail address. Some of the default notifications include alerting you whenever students submit work and sending copies of Inbox messages. For students, they’re notified when they receive a new grade. These defaults can be changed on the Notifications page, which is found by clicking on “Account” (with your profile picture) on the course navigation menu, then “Notifications” on the submenu.

Notifications highlighted on Account submenu in Canvas

On Notifications, you’ll see all the things you can be notified about, from grades to communication and more. You can change whether you’d like to be notified about each discrete event or whether you’d like a digest.

Notification frequencies, from immediately to a summary to notifications off

If you’re not sure what each notification event is, you can hover over the name to get a longer description. This page goes into more detail about settings as well.

Example of detailed notification information, showing "Course Content" correlates to changes to page, quiz, and assignment content

If you want phone-based notifications, I highly recommend downloading the Canvas app. There are multiple apps by Instructure, but the one you’ll want is Canvas Teacher. This will not only allow you to receive push notifications on your phone or tablet, but also gives you another way to grade and connect with students through Discussions.

Maybe you’re wanting to stop all notifications from a courQse, such as if you’ve been added in a supervisory role. You can set up course-level notifications both from the Notifications by going to the drop-down menu under “Settings for” and selecting the course in question…

"Settings for" menu with a drop-down menu showing course names

…or by going to the course itself, then clicking “View Course Notifications” on the right side of the Home page. I’ve found the latter option to be a bit easier for smaller numbers of courses.

View Course Notifications button on Home page

This is also how you can easily toggle off all notifications for the course, which is probably want you’re wanting to do in this instance:

Course Notifications Settings, with the settings toggle enabled

Finally, it bears repeating that students can—and should—set up their notifications in a way that best suits them. Here is a guide for students on setting up notifications that can be shared in your courses. It has information about the Canvas Student app as well. Feel free to send the information as an announcement or add it to a module.


 Add a Comment

0 Comments.

  Subscribe



Enter your e-mail address to receive notifications of new posts by e-mail.


  Archive



  Return to Blog
This post is closed for further discussion.