What are Canvas Notifications?

Canvas will send an email or text notification when certain activities happen in your course. . Notifications are sent to Canvas contact methods as specified in your account. Canvas includes a set of default notification preferences however, you can change the default settings by setting your own notification preferences. Notifications are sent as one of four delivery types: notify me right away, daily summary, weekly summary, or don't send. If you change a setting, the change is made immediately to your account.

Why Use Them?

You don't want to miss important communications from your students. Notifications can let you know when students have sent you a message, when assignments are submitted for grading, if a student has responded to a feedback comment, or provide a daily summary of a discussion forum. You can receive notifications in the method most convenient to you - whether that is a work or personal email address, a text message, or a notification on your mobile device.

By customizing your settings, you can choose which items you need immediate notification, which can wait until the end of the day or week, and which do not apply to you at all. This can be especially useful with discussions. An active discussion board can send many messages each day. Unless you plan to be an active participant in the discussion, you may only want a single summary at the end of the day. For some discussions you may not want notifications at all, in which case you will need to do an additional step of unsubscribing to the discussion.

How-To

The first thing to do is to set up your contact methods so you are notified via your preferred method: email, text, or Canvas app. Then set up your notifications preference for each item - both the type of delivery and place of delivery.

If you are confused about the notifications, check out the guide on what each one means and what triggers it. For example, Conversations refers to the Canvas messaging tool, aka the Inbox.

Once you set up your notifications for discussions, you can also choose which discussions will send notifications by subscribing or unsubscribing to them.