Conditional notifications (AKA Brightspace intelligent agents)

As we look to migrate to Canvas from Brightspace, one glaring gap is the ability to send emails to learners based upon their activity within a course.

the notifications in Canvas seem to be the closest, but are obviously very prescriptive in content and timing.
do people leverage API calls or something to achieve this kind of cimmuncation need?
interested to know your thoughts…

Theo

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Accepted answers

Chris

Hi @TheoBrandt,

Thanks for taking the time to share your idea/feedback with the community. While the Instructure Community forums are a great place to continue to ask how-to questions or for troubleshooting, there is a new dedicated space for ideas, the Collaborative Roadmap.

Posting your idea to the new Collaborative Roadmap will ensure your feedback reaches appropriate Instructure Product Managers and teams developing the products, and doesn’t get lost here in the general forums. Please explore the new dedicated Product Connection space, which includes the Collaborative Roadmap. You can read Shiren's blog post for a full look at how the Collaborative Roadmaps give you a clearer view of what’s coming soon, what’s in development, and what’s under consideration.

🚩 I’m marking this response as the "Answer" to help guide other users with ideas or feature requests to the right place.

-Chris

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Chris_Hofer

Hi @TheoBrandt …

What kind of notifications are you looking for that your instructors would use? Yes, there is the "Notifications" screen where all users (Canvas admins, instructors, students, etc.) can set up their own notifications (both at the account level and the course level), but if you go into a course and take a look at the "Course Analytics" page, you can also send out some notifications to students based on certain criteria there, too. For example, an instructor could message students who have a score range from X to Y%, for students who have missing assignments, or for students who have late assignments. Or, an instructor might send a message to students who viewed/didn't view something in the course, or that did or did not participate in the course. Here are a few resources for you:

I'm not sure if any of these Guides have things you are looking for in Canvas, but I thought I'd share them just in case. Hope this helps in some way.

TheoBrandt

thanks Chris, I'm looking for automated notifications rather than manually created ones.

for example…

each day at 8:00 am run this:

If a learner registered into this course has not completed this assessment send this email content

preloaded notification

on this date run this:

If a learner is registered for this group (section in canvas) then send this email content

Chris_Hofer

Hi @TheoBrandt …

Thank you for providing more context about the kinds of automatic notifications you'd like to set up. Unfortunately, I cannot think of any built-in notifications you could set up within Canvas that could accomplish what you want. The only notifications I'm really familiar with are those at the user account and the course level that I've already described.

That would be a neat feature idea, though. However, at this time, the entire notification process is on hold while the Community Team finalizes the new process for us. I'm not exactly sure when the new ideas process will be released into the wild here in the Community site, but I do know they are working on something. They have all of our previously submitted ideas from the old Community site stored away safe and sound, so nothing has been lost. It's just a "wait and see" period right now.

Sorry I don't have better news for you, but I hope this will be of help in some way.

Chris

Hi @TheoBrandt,

🚩 I’m marking this response as the "Answer" to help guide other users with ideas or feature requests to the right place.

-Chris

TheoBrandt

thanks all- I was interesed in finding out if anyone is leveraging Canvas API with mailchimp or any such service to create this kind of automation?

TheoBrandt

I found a couple of prposed ideas to comment on :)

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