[ARCHIVED] [ARCHIVED] Top Two Most Important Feature Ideas/Bugs/Issues for Canvas Admins

[scottdennis]

In Canvas Feature Ideas​ the top ten ideas submissions that are tagged with admin​ are currently:

1. More granular permissions for admins (306)
2. Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students (216)
3. Advanced Admin Search & Sort (166)
4. The ability to edit Global Announcements (164)
5. More built in reports for Canvas Admins (144)
6. Pagination for Courses List (Admin) (141)
7. Create Question Banks from MSWord (141)
8. Ability to change a users role without deleting the user (126)
9. Create Global Announcement capability at the Sub-Account level (116)
10. Extend Course for Individual Student (100)

What do you think are the top two feature ideas/bugs/weaknesses in Canvas from the perspective of admins.

Thanks,

SD

[susan_cornish]

For us it would be #2 and #1, both central to our business model and potentially holding us back.#2 currently has a significant impact on our financial reporting. #8 is related and also a biggie for us.

[kschneider25]

Number 1 & 3 are my top votes.

[shane_ohara]

Plain and simple...these ALL need to happen. I don't care what order. They just have to happen sooner than later in order for Canvas to continually state that they improve their product - for everyone. Seriously, re-open #1 and get it done!! #2 and 3 wouldn't be so bad either.

Shane

[cms_hickss]

I'm going to post this here since #1 is getting a lot of "votes" and that Idea has been Archived as we were asked to separate it out by tool. Which we did but with less than 20 days to go in their voting period none of them have reached the necessary 100 votes to be considered.

If Granular Permissions are important to you and you haven't already done so, please go vote. Pass the list on to your fellow Admins.

11. " modifiedtitle="true" title="In Permissions, Separate Manage (add/edit/delete) courses into 3 permi...​

If the original request received more than 300 votes these should be able to get at least 100.

[shane_ohara]

Done!

[awilliams]

Thanks for reminding me about these. Gave 'em all my vote.

[scottdennis]

We talked about this in a meeting yesterday, Susan.   Thanks again for helping us to understand which specific areas of Canvas people want more granular permissions for.  We are watching all the individual threads.

[scottdennis]

As of this morning the results of this straw poll match up with the priorities identified in feature voting.  Thank you all for helping me confirm this.  This information will be useful in an upcoming planning meeting.

[buellj]

I arrived late but was happy to see what was on the top 3 of the list.

[vrichter]

Number 8

[parde]

For admins, our top two would be 2 (Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students) and 3 (Advanced Admin Search & Sort). However, if I'm an admin speaking on behalf of Midland's professors, 7 (Create Question Banks from MSWord) has the highest priority of any features other than Attendance Over Haul.

[KristinL]

What a list! Talk about options.

#1 More granular permissions for admins

#8 Ability to change a users role without deleting the user

#2 Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students

[morloff]

#2 is really important for last day of attendance reporting (financial aid), student performance petitions, etc. without access to the withdrawn student's activity due to enrollment deletion, students could contest that they were dropped without cause...we currently use Canvas for only a subset of courses- our other LMS has this feature and it is essential to supporting student-related enrollment, A&R, financial aid issues.

[kurt_hayes]

For us, it is #2 and #10:

Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students (216)

Extend Course for Individual Student (100)

[desiree_deverea]

#2 and # 3.  Heck, I want them ALL!  Because of federal financial aid requirements, it is ESSENTIAL that we have #2.

[aleverton]

1. More granular permissions for admins (306)
2. Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students (216)

[msanders]

I vote for #2 and #8.

• Inactive enrollment status for withdrawn students (216)
• Ability to change a users role without deleting the user (126)

[karyn1]

#1 and #3 would be fantastic, but #9 is important to us as well.

[dianepbh]

Possible to do this via a survey?

#1 and #3

[hesspe]

I'm in the boat with those who answered #1 and #3.  I suspect programming an QA-ing #1 would a major undertaking and different people probably have different ideas about how they'd like permissions re-organized.  If it happens anytime soon, I'll be surprised.  If it's anywhere in the road map, it would be interesting to know that.

For #5, I'm aware of one report I would really, really like to have to manage our site securely: a report of who has sub-Admin privileges, by sub-account and by type of Admin role.  It would be interesting to know what other reports people prioritize.

One small thing that would make a big difference to me (and potentially save me from making a serious mistake) is if the privileges page could be scrolled with the header row and type column staying in place (a la grade book).

I appreciate the question because Admin feature requests may not pass the usual bar to gain attention, since they are of interest to a smaller cohort.

[kmeeusen]

I agree with what you are saying, Peter!

While I understand that the focus should be on improvements that benefit the student first, there are sure a lot of feature requests in the "accommodate my personal workflow" category that are gaining traction.  There are very few of us admins in the Community, although some of us can be a tad bit vocal, and I fear the always rather clunky admin side of Canvas is getting very little attention. Part of that, as you pointed out, may simply be the difficulty of modifying the very fundamental coding of the admin functions that most likely snake through so much of the rest of Canvas.

Admins support students and teachers! Give us a break and lower the voting bar a bit!

[scottdennis]

I an attempt to better understand the priorities of various types of users, I created three discussions in three user groups:

1. this one - what are the priorities of admins

2. Top Two Most Important Ideas for K12 Canvas Users

3. Top Two Feature Ideas/Issues/Bugs for Mobile

We have talked a lot about whether to set up alternate voting processes or count votes differently for relative minority groups but have instead decided for now to keep all as it is with regards to voting thresholds but in addition to looking at vote totals, also using polling (and discussions like this one) as well as using tagging to let us look at the popularity of ideas relative to other ideas that appeal to different user roles.  At last count, there were over 50 'votes' cast for this little informal poll and we used the information in a planning meeting yesterday.

[dianepbh]

Peter - I agree... Many teachers.. Many students.. A few admins who support the many. OUr ability to admin with efficiency and pay attention to the details that students and teachers benefit from has to have a higher priority that a voting process that is not going to always show what is critical for admins.

[cms_hickss]

There is an Idea open for fixing the Permissions page layout issues ( ). It still needs 83 votes to get to 100. [Note, that this is the second time this Idea has been tried and it didn't receive enough votes last time around.]

[lcahill]

All but #2 and #7 would be great for me.

• I would cross out #2 because we enroll using SIS imports and refresh twice daily including drop records
• Would love to convert Word tests to Canvas-compatible tests and use something native to Canvas, but since we have that app and it integrated nicely with Canvas, I cross out #7.

[millerjm]

Hi Linda,

FYI, #2 is not about dropping students - it's about preserving their grades activity for instructors to see.  We update 5x per day but if we drop students, the instructor no longer has access to the records.  If we conclude the enrollment, then instructors cannot see all of the activity/grades - only certain things.

[kona]

 @millerjm ​, instructors can see all grades for concluded students from the gradebook by going to the gear icon and clicking on "Show concluded enrollments. There's also an option from the People tab to "View Prior Enrollments" that provides access to a students "Access Report," but I'm not sure what permissions on the Instructor side need to be enabled for this to be visible. I just checked and while I can see it (I'm an Admin), when I log in as one of my Instructors it was not visible (I'm guessing this has to do with how our permissions are set-up).

Regardless, I'm all for an Inactive roll/status! It would make my life a lot easier because faculty would have easy access to everything about concluded students.

[cms_hickss]

We can not use the "conclude" ("completed" in the SIS) option (to mark users as inactive) because it still allows the student read-only access to the course content (if the course is still open). Which means "deleted" is our only option and those students do not show in the "View Prior Enrollments" area.

[millerjm]

At the admin level, we had to turn off the ability for students to see classes after the term end dates.  It wasn't easy to try to figure out and our Implementation Consultant helped us with this setup. 

However, as I stated below...

We had to grant the ability to add/remove users in order for faculty to be able to view prior enrollments!  And then use a JS override to take away the button to +People to the class (which sometimes isn't effective and at other times hides the button from admins).

[millerjm]

 @kona ​

Now I remember.  We had to grant the ability to add/remove users in order for faculty to be able to view prior enrollments!  And then use a JS override to take away the button to +People to the class (which sometimes isn't effective and at other times hides the button from admins).

Yet another reason for !

But there is some information that they still can't see when a student is concluded...instructors should be able to see everything.

[reedt]

I think Options 1 & 3 are most important. However, I consider Option 6 to be a feature included within Option 3.

[farbelaez]

My top 2 features needed are:

1. More granular permissions for admins

3. Advanced Admin Search & Sort

But hopefully all of them will be implemented at some point of time.

[ksoper]

Definitely 5 and 3!

As an online high school, we need to be able to run reports and see everything little thing students are doing. 

[mribkoff]

1More granular permissions for admins

2Advanced Admin Search & Sort

[kshaffer]

My teachers would LOVE number 7!

[nschwiet]

Definitely 1More granular permissions for admins

and maybe 3Advanced Admin Search & Sort

[cms_hickss]

Deactivated user​ is asking for details on why the following permission changes are being requested, please offer your responses/workflow/policies/etc at each Idea:

•  

Thank you,

Susan

[fazzarit]

1. More granular permissions for admins

2. Advanced admin Search and Sort

[cms_hickss]

All 11 of the Idea/Enhancement requests for having permissions that included add, edit, delete, remove, etc as one setting separated into multiple settings have received more than 100 votes and were moved into the Gathering Information stage. Canvas has begun asking for reasoning and use cases for why this separation is important.

If separating out the “add, edit, delete” permissions are important to your institution please take a moment to leave a reason or use case on the Ideas.

11. ​

Thank you.

[scottdennis]

Thank you, Susan!