This page walks you through screen shots of the steps necessary to be notified immediately for Announcements and Conversations. You are free to personalize notifications as you see fit, but it is important to understand that Instructor will be using Announcements to inform students of class cancellations, changes to assignments, and other important information.

You can assess whether or not you've correctly set up forwarding notifications to an email address based on whether or not you receive an announcement reminding you about the first Live Session, typically sent the day before the first Live Session is scheduled.

Communicating with the Instructor

The most efficient and effective way to communicate with the Instructor is to use Canvas messaging (a.k.a. Conversations), not regular email. Canvas messages automatically include course information in the message heading, which makes it easier for the Instructor to respond to your questions and concerns.

Critical Notifications

If you set up your notification preferences to route notifications to your "regular" email (whether its your OU email address, a work email, or a personal email), you can receive important timely notifications without having to enter Canvas. You can also reply without having to enter Canvas.

While there is an extensive list of notifications in Canvas, there are only two critical ones that you need in order to stay up to the minute:

Conversations - This is the medium by which you'll be notified of Canvas messages sent to you personally.
Announcements - This is the medium by which you'll be notified of class cancellations, assignment changes, or any other significant course change that affects everyone enrolled in the course.

Again, you are free to personalize all other notifications as you see fit. However, there are some downsides to setting all notifications to "Notify me right away."

If you set all your notification preferences to "Notify me right away," then every time something is changed, you will receive instant notification. The changes may range from immaterial changes (correcting typos) to substantive changes (changes to assignment instructions), and you will be notified of them all. Additionally, you won't receive notification of what changed, just a notification that some change was made. Further, the change may actually be invisible to students (for instance, if the Instructor changes something in the assignment Canvas setup but not the actual assignment content). Therefore, I strongly recommend that you leave all non-essential notification settings to "Do not send me anything." Again, all substantive changes to grade book items are communicated via announcements.

How to Set Up Communication Preferences

This is a lengthy set of screen shots, which you may want to write down or print out before undertaking the process.

You will be presented with a new dialogue box. Select Settings.

This is where you will enter the email address(es) where you want to receive notifications of announcements and Canvas messages.

While you are in this screen, make sure -- at a minimum -- that your display name and default email address(es) appear the way you want them to. You can also set pronoun preferences.

Make sure that you update your settings before navigating away from the Settings screen.

The Notifications screen is where you set up the frequency of notifications for all things Canvas, using the email settings that you just completed.

Again, you can personalize your notification preferences, but receiving "right away" notifications for Announcements and Conversation Messages guarantees that you can receive timely notification of announcements and new in-box messages without having to log into Canvas.

The process should be complete. Remember to always doublecheck whether you have to save all changes before exiting.