Canvas has an excellent tool for parents and guardians to be able to stay in the know about their student's coursework: Observers! Observers are able to view their assigned student's account and communicate with that student's instructors to stay up to date on what's due, as well as course progress. You can have all of these items sent as notifications in your email by using the Canvas Notifications.
Currently, Observer accounts have access to the following notifications for their paired students:
Due Dates
Assignment due date changes, or additions
Grading Policies
Course Grading Policy changes
New Course Content
Changes to course content including page, assignment, and quiz content
Announcements
New announcement in a course
Grading
Grade changes in your courses. This includes entering or changing a submission grades and posting assignment grades.
Invitations
This includes invitations to Web Conferences, Collaborations, Groups, Peer Reviews, and Peer Review reminders.
Comment Submissions
Assignment submission comments
Conversation Messages sent to you
New conversations sent to your Inbox.
Conversation Created by you
Conversations you have created in your inbox
Calendar Events
New or changed Calendar events
Appointment Sign-ups
A user is signed up for an appointment by a teacher. This notification occurs when an instructor creates an appointment group and selects the option for students to sign up in groups. After one group member makes an appointment, any other group member with this preference activated will receive a notification
Appointment Cancellations
Appointments are cancelled
Student Appointment Sign-up
Students signed up for an appointment in Scheduler
Global Announcements
Global announcement sent by an admin
What would be most useful notifications to receive?
While there are a lot of notification possibilities, sometimes it's best to pare it down to just the essentials. Generally speaking, the most useful notifications for an Observer profile are:
- Grading
- Due Dates
- Conversation Messages sent to you
- Calendar Events
- Global Announcements
To enable these notifications, follow along in the How do I manage Canvas notifications sent to my Gmail inbox? guide.
If you still have questions around Observer accounts, don't hesitate to reach out to our technical support team by following the advice in this guide article:
How do I get technical support?