SIS course imports do not appear on user Dashboard?

[palmarinich]

We are approaching our first semester with Canvas, and have found something of concern.  When importing courses via SIS, the courses do not appear on the Dashboard by default for either the Teacher or the Student roles.   I would swear that SIS imported courses appeared on the Dashboard when testing in the past, but now we just can't get it to happen.

Is this expected?

And, there does not appear to be a way to have a course automatically set to Published when using SIS imports.  The only method I have found so far is Is there a way to automatically publish a course?  Is that it?

At the moment, I've very concerned that both students and instructors will have a hard time finding their courses when first accessing Canvas, and will need to find their way to Courses > All Courses in order to "star" all of their current courses.

What am I missing?  Any suggestions or insights would be appreciated.  Thanks!

[palmarinich · Accepted solution]

Well, naturally shortly after posting this question I came upon some other discussions on the same topic (which strangely did not come up in my various search efforts).

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New Courses in the New UI Dashboard

Apparently this is the expected behavior, and others also have this concern.   I think I can say with confidence that our Helpdesk will be slammed on the first day of school, so we'll just have to write up a stock response to what is sure to be a common question.

[Stef_retired]

Jinx! I see you found the answer to your question,  @palmarinich . You're wise to get ahead of this by communicating the change as much as possible to your teachers and students.

[Stef_retired]

 @palmarinich , you're not alone in thinking that this behavior has changed somewhere along the line. Once Canvas users started noticing it, someone posted a feature idea (basically to change it back to the way we remember it having worked), and it's still open for voting:    It is also marked "Under Consideration," with a comment from the product team, placing it clearly on their radar for (re-)implementation.

[palmarinich]

Thanks.  Back in December, we used SIS to push out a sandbox course for every employee (wheeee!), and these courses appeared on the Dashboard by default, no treasure hunting required.  We were on the new UI, and all was well.   It sounds like there was an update at some point after that which changed this behavior.  We want it back!  😉

[powellj]

 @palmarinich , What you are seeing might not necessarily be part of the issue in the other posts you found. Typically, for a new user the Favorites view is not enabled by default. When Favorites view is not enabled (no courses have gold stars), all courses will appear on the Dashboard. Since Canvas is new to you and your users, it is very likely that the course(s) will appear on their Dashboard by default since they have not yet enabled that Favorites view.

What you may be experiencing instead is an issue of the course(s) not yet being in a current Term. Courses in which a user is enrolled for future terms will not appear on the Dashboard, which is expected behavior (and not part of the issue discussed in the other threads). I believe this may also happen when the course start dates are in the future as well, but we exclusively use the Terms to control our access so I can't confirm, but theoretically I believe that's how it works also.

[palmarinich]

Jacci, I think you called it.  I do recall now that a user will see all courses on the Dashboard when none have been starred, and this would explain why all of our employee sandboxes were visible by default (they only had the one course, and had never accessed Canvas before).

We currently do not use Term dates, since course times vary.  I will experiment with how term dates and course dates affect course visibility on the Dashboard.

[powellj]

One thing I do to help alleviate the phone calls at the start of each semester - I place a global announcement, to all Students, that says essentially, "Looking for your Canvas course?". It contains one or two sentences, and then points them to a webpage with a breakdown of the most common reasons and how to resolve them. (If you're interested, it's this page: Where is My Course? | Tallahassee Community College ) I keep the announcement visible for the first 1.5-2 weeks of each semester. So far I've done that for two semesters now and it has significantly reduced the call volume to our Help Desk, as quite literally "where is my Canvas course" was one of the most frequent support requests we were getting, especially after the Dashboard/Favorites View debacle noted in the above conversation.