Announcements

The Announcements tool enables you to create announcements that help communicate course updates, changes, and new information to your users quickly and effectively. Since My Home or Course Home will be the first page that users see when they log in or access their courses, the Announcements widget is a good area for displaying important information.

Global News

Global Announcements are posted by administrators and appear to everyone in the organization.  Examples might include announcements about scheduled system maintenance, computer use policies, etc. They appear in the same My Home and Course Home pages’ Announcements widget as course-related news items.

Note: You will see the word ‘Global’ under the title of Global Announcements in your News widget.

Creating an Announcement

To create a new Announcement:

1. Click on New Announcement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
2. Add A Headline and Content.
   If you want to add the student’s first name on the content, you can add the tag {Firstname}. Students will see their first name on the announcement.
   
3. To set up the expiry dates for the Announcement, Set a Start date and Time and a End date and Time to specify the duration of visibility of the Announcements.
4. If you want to have Start date,  check the box Always show Start date.
5. Please make sure you always have an End date. To set an end date, check the box Remove Announcement based on the end date. P.S: If there is no end date specified, the announcement will be visible to the students until the end of the semester. Also, if you are planning to use the announcement in the future courses, to avoid all the Announcement to be visible as you copy the course over, setting an End date will be more helpful.
6. Then click Publish.

I copied my course over and all my announcements are active. What do I do?

This has occurred because when the Announcement was created, No End Date was set up. To make them inactive, you have to set an end date to each Announcement. If you do not have a specific end date for the Announcement, you can add the end of the semester as the end date. That way, when the course is copied over the next term, the announcement remains inactive, and you can change the start date and end date and reuse them when you want.