[Admin Tools] Sort Newest/Oldest in New Course Search for Admins

[RobDitto]

The wonderful New Course Search in Canvas Production Release 2018-03-10 unfortunately removes the option to sort listings of courses based on course creation date.  Admins regularly need to work with the newest courses within an account, sub-account, or term; for example, a sub-account admin might need a glanceable list of which recently created courses remain unpublished.

The legacy Admin Courses searching/filtering sidebar included a Sort:  option which included Newest - Oldest and Oldest - Newest choices (as well as A - Z and Z - A, which do have equivalents in New Course Search).  It will be wonderful for New Course Search to include a similar capability, perhaps located near the Course column header.

[RobDitto]

In Canvas Beta Release Notes (2018-02-26), erinhallmark‌ wrote:

This topic was discussed by our engineers, actually, and the current API doesn't have a good way for us to display that information. We could possibly add that date if enough customers have a workflow that is affected by not sorting by creation date...
What our engineers need to know in that idea is whether you would rather have the courses page display courses by published date or creation date.

My institution's preferred implementation would be by creation date/time, perhaps with published/unpublished state as a further filtering option (akin to Show only blueprint courses).

[thomas_mckenna]

I agree with Rob's proposal with having a Creation date, and it would be useful to have the option to list courses by Creation Date as a default.

[Jeff_F]

Right on.  Perhaps it would be much better if the default view sorted by SIS ID descending, with those courses not having an SIS ID appearing at the bottom of the list.

But I also like the creation date idea.

[robotcars]

Edit: I found my comment is voided by this idea https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/11043-make-sub-account-name-a-hyperlink-in-the-new-course-sear... 

Voted for both!

 @RobDitto ‌,

Great idea, I'd also like to request that the Sub-Account column needs to be a link to the course's sub account. We push courses from the SIS into Canvas into a sub account respective of their subject department. This allows schools to add department chairs as an admin of their sub account.

However, for users higher up, every one of these could be in a different school...

[ellen_peters]

For us, it is absolutely preferred to have the creation date column in the overview, with the option to sort by creation date. Even better: the option to search for courses created after/before a specified date...

In general: it would be ideal that the admin can configure which columns are included in the overview. So if the list of teachers is not relevant for you, you could exclude the column. Excluding columns may also decrease the loading time of the page.

[choryuen_wong]

I found a workaround using a bit of URL manipulation to sort the courses from newest (top) to oldest until Canvas has this feature or something similar.

On the Admin > Courses page:
1) Click on Course column twice to sort the courses in descending order
2) In the browser URL, where it says sort=course_name, change the text ‘name’ to ‘id’
3) Hit Enter

This will sort all the courses by their course ID from newest to oldest.

[RobDitto]

 @choryuen_wong ‌, this is fantastic - I gave you a Thank You badge under separate cover. My team's admins will try this out along with Admin Tips: Search Quickly for Users & Courses.

[ellen_peters]

Thanks  @choryuen_wong ! This is really useful. I discovered that you can add 'order=desc' in the URL to get a sorted list from newest to olderst. So the end of the URL will be 'sort=course_id&order=desc'

[jppepper]

Thank you!! We just got the new update today, and this is driving me crazy. We absolutely need a sort feature by date created.

[peter_lombardo]

Hi Ellen,

This method works great.

Thanks so much!!!