Canvas includes a set of default notification preferences you can receive for your courses. Notifications are sent to Canvas contact methods as specified in your account. However, you can change the default settings by setting your own notification preferences. These preferences only apply to you; they are not used to control how course updates are sent to other users. To learn more about each notification, default settings, and notification triggers, view the Canvas Notifications PDF.

Notifications are sent as one of four delivery types: send right away, daily summary, weekly summary, or don't send. If you change a setting, the change is made immediately to your account.

Notification settings apply to all of your courses; you cannot change settings for individual courses.

You can reply directly to email notifications outside of Canvas and have the reply appear in Conversations. However, please be aware that attachments added as part of an external reply are not included with the message shown in the Canvas Inbox.

Note: The Canvas by Instructure app supports setting notification preferences. However, setting preferences inside the app will override preferences in the browser version of Canvas, and daily and weekly preferences are not supported.

In Canvas you can add contact methods to receive notifications. Contact methods allow you to select how you want to be notified when various events occur within a course. Notifications are applied to all courses in Canvas. Canvas supports notification through email, SMS text message, and Twitter.

Once you add contact methods, you can set your own Notification Preferences to select how often you want to be notified of course events.

View a video about Notification Preferences.

RSS, also known as Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is a web feed format that publishes frequently updated information from external websites such as blogs, news headlines, audio, and video. RSS feeds benefit users who want to receive timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.

You can add an external RSS feed in a group announcement. Please note that when you create the RSS feed, only future feed content will be pulled into the announcement; it will not pull any existing or backdated content.

Note: Adding an RSS feed will create an announcement for every new item added to that feed. Users that have chosen to be notified of new announcements in their Canvas notification preferences may see a substantial increase in the amount of notifications they receive.