I would like more control of the Admin Menu.

[bgibson]

I would like to be able to list courses by their "SIS ID".  This is something that our faculty cannot change.  They can change the course "Name" and that can lead to a useless, confused, out of sequence list.  I had some faculty rename their courses starting with numbers and/or the day of the week it is taught.  In the example above, Chemistry courses go to the top of the list just because of the numbers the instructor re-assigned to the course name.  *I hope they don't realize that they could use special characters like the tilde ~ to become even more prominent than numbers.

And, as I've suggested elsewhere, when I click on the Admin link on the left and the Admin Menu slides out with  just the "Account Title" link and the "All Accounts" link, there is a ton of wasted white space in which all the management items on the far right (e.g. Course Filtering,..Find a Course,... Open Theme Editor... Add a New Course, etc.) could be added.  *Think about the ergonomics.  Less wasted motion.  I click on Admin, the menu slides out, and I don't have to drag my mouse across the page to get to the actual functions I am going to use.  It's like a "heads up" display, but instead of in a fighter jet, its a slick LMS Admin interface;-)

[tdelillo]

I completely agree with you. In the meantime, though, there is a super cool trick that I learned from this post - Efficiency tips for Admins - creating a custom search engine in Chrome that does a course or user search of your environment without having to do all that navigating. It is SUCH a time saver!

[Stef_retired]

 @bgibson , I posted a link to your excellent mockup in .

[bgibson]

I didn't see it from the above link, but here it is.

[Chris_Hofer]

We are rolling out the new UI at the end of the month, and we are going to encourage our faculty and adjuncts to use the "nickname" feature in course cards on the Dashboard rather than actually renaming their courses via course "Settings".  Have you explored that option at your school?  How do I create a nickname for my course? (New Canvas UI)

[tim_hass]

We turned off the ability for instructor to rename courses once the nicknames feature was live.  This has helped me with finding courses for those instructors that needed assistance.  However, I do believe there is more improvements needed to the course search feature.

[John_Lowe]

Great suggestion,  @bgibson ​!  To go along with your first textbox in your screenshot, and to provide the flexibility requested in the final box, perhaps they could show a nice multi-criteria search bar at the top of the screen (where they now tell you that they only show 50 courses).  If you want to search and see results by course name, you can do that.  Likewise, if you want to search and see results by SIS ID or Instructor name, you can do that as well.

[bgibson]

John, that "multi-criteria search bar" is hauntingly familiar.

[John_Lowe]

When I saw your community profile endorsements, I thought you might recognize it. 

[kona]

Preaching to the choir.... the admin side of Canvas has gotten very little love since we started using it in 2012. I can't count the time I've wasted looking up specific courses, students, etc...

[John_Lowe]

To expand upon my above comment, if we ever see this feature ( ) come to be, it'd be great if that flexible, multi-criteria, search box could also search and/or sort by course format -- on-campus, online, and hybrid.  It'd be so awesome to do a quick search for all "hybrid" courses in the current term taught by Professor X. 

No really, it would be SO awesome if that could happen!!  And I don't mean like this... although that'd be cool too.

[matthew_weather]

As  @tdelillo ​ mentioned, you can use the Chrome search trick. However, I frequently want to search for a specific class in a specific term (so there are two search strings). Until we get a search panel like  @bgibson ​ made, you can actually make your own search boxes in HTML, and use that to search for courses or users. (Skipping the "Too many courses" page altogether.)

If you'd like to try it out, see instructions on a page I posted here: Canvas Admin Tips and Tricks

It looks like this:

[John_Lowe]

I just wanted to remind those watching this thread of this old feature idea that was archived but said was coming within 6 months.

This would be a decent stop-gap if we can't get something better.  There have been so many discussions, ideas, comments, mock-ups, etc. about this topic.  I hope Instructure can look at all of the discussions as a whole and make something that Canvas Admins really love.

[trinaadams]

Just checking to see if I've missed an update.

Each time I visit the courses in our sub account, I must run the filters to access the desired course. Currently, the default term is All Terms and not a productive use of screen space.

Is there any way to make the filter settings sticky to maintain the view of the most recent filter applied? For example, going into a new calendar year, I would like the default view to be of the courses within that calendar year. I will still need occasional access to the old courses and would much rather filter for the old content as opposed to the new.

course filter‌ course list filtering‌ 

[matthew_weather]

Trina,

There's not a way to do this within Canvas, but the good news is that since much of the account / term info for a specific search is already in the URL, it might just be as easy as bookmarking the search once you're looking at the right term and filter.

If that's not good enough, you could easily make a custom Google search if you use the Google Chrome browser. Take a look at this: Admin Tips: Search Quickly for Users & Courses where I describe this in more detail.

Matthew