Any new announcements you create appear at the top of the Announcements channel. These announcements can be viewed by all students enrolled in the course or by specific students you select. Additionally, when you create an announcement, you have the option of "pinning" the announcement to ensure that it appears at the top of the list, even after other announcements are created.
Before you create an announcement, you should determine who should receive the announcement. Announcements you create from the Announcements channel on the Communicate page appear to students in that course. For details on how to access the Announcements channel, see View announcements.
Students enrolled in your courses can view any announcements you create from their My Course and Testbanks page, regardless of the page from which you create the announcement. This is because the Announcements channel on the My Course and Testbanks page includes the announcements for all of the courses in which a student is enrolled.
Note: Students cannot create announcements.
To create an announcement:
Select Communicate and click Unread Announcements.
Click Create Announcement.
Select the courses and recipients for the announcement:
Click To.
To select all courses, click Select All Courses.
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To display the announcement to all students in a course, click Show all. If a student is enrolled in more than one course, the recipient receives one copy of the announcement.
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To select individual recipients, click the expand icon (+) and click the boxes to select recipients.
Click Add Recipients. Recipient names appear in the To field.
To view all recipients, click Show All. To close the selected recipients list, click Collapse.
Enter the announcement Subject.
To send the announcement as a course mail message, select Send a copy of the announcement as course mail message. If you select this option, the announcement appears in the recipient's mail inbox for the course in addition to appearing in the Announcements channel. Note that this option is available if you make the announcement available now. It is not available if you restrict the announcement to a specific date range.
Indicate when you want the announcement to appear:
Make available now: Select to have the announcement appear in the Announcements channel immediately after you create it.
Choose date restrictions: Specify the dates and times when you want the announcement to appear:
Click the calendar icon to select the Display after date, and enter the Time.
Click the calendar icon to select the Display until date, and enter the Time.
Remove Announcement: Select to display the announcement only to the person who created it.
If you want the course announcement to appear as the first message in the Announcements channel on the course Today's View page, select Pin Announcement. Note that instructors can only have two announcements "pinned" at any one time and program administrators can have only one announcement pinned at a time. For details on how to unpin an announcement, see Edit announcements. When an instructor or teaching assistant and a program administrator both pin an announcement, the instructor or teaching assistant announcement appears first, followed by the program administrator announcement.
To have the announcement open automatically the next time the recipient signs in, click Deliver as pop-up message. Recipients can read the announcement and navigate to other announcements, then close the pop-up window to continue working.
Note: Announcements support special character entry, including Chinese Pinyin, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish characters.
To save the announcement, click Create.
Click Close.
The announcement appears in the Announcements channel either immediately or on the date and time you specified.