[Catalog] Ability to Turn Off Account Registration and Shopping Cart

[danielcktan]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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Our organisation has been using Canvas for our LMS and Canvas Catalog for Course Listings.

Our LMS is only accessible to our students and staff. Hence we have turned off user account registration at the Canvas platform.

However, the recent feature additions to Catalog do not seem to honour the above settings.

Users will still be able to access the registration form if they click on "Switch Account" on the course enrolment page.

This results in unwanted user account created as well as enrolments on both Catalog and Canvas.

We would like to suggest an option in the Catalog settings to completely turn off:

• User Account Registration
• Shopping Cart

As our Canvas Setup does not require the above options.

[KristinL]

Hi @danielcktan -

Thank you for sharing this idea! I would like to collaborate with you and learn more about your needs!

I wonder if a combination of these (already-existing) Ideas would help you accomplish the outcome you described:

Restrict Catalog Enrollments Based on Domain 

Registration Restrictions by Canvas Catalog Listing 

[KristinL]

Hi @danielcktan -

I am checking on this Idea, and I hope you are doing well!

Were you able to review the shared Ideas? Do you feel that they are related? If so, should we merge your thread into one of them? The Community Team knows life can get busy, yet if we don't hear from you by March 16, we will archive this thread so we can better focus on current requests. 

[danielcktan]

Hi @KristinL 
Apologies for the delayed response as I was down with COVID early March and only have time to login to the community after I cleared my outstanding tasks upon returning from my medical leave.

Yes, I would like to continue the conversation for this idea.

Will restricting enrollment prevents the "registration form" from appearing?

[rmurchshafer]

Hi Daniel,

I'm trying to understand your use case here.  My understanding of the primary use of Catalog is to allow a registration portal for people outside of an organization to "shop for", register for, pay for (optional) and create their user accounts which are then added to the Canvas.  It sounds to me like your use case is to let people within your organization (students, teachers) who all already have accounts look through and sign up for classes and/or events.  Is this correct?  

If this is the case I'm wondering why even have Catalog in the first place.  Couldn't you just use the Public Course Index feature within Canvas to accomplish the same thing without the need to even mess with Catalog? https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Admin-Guide/How-do-I-view-my-institution-s-Public-Course-Index-as...

I'm not saying your request isn't legitimate, just that from my understanding of typical use cases for Catalog, your request is to have the ability (option) to disable what I consider to be the main purpose of Catalog.  

Rick

[danielcktan]

hi @rmurchshafer,

Our institution has been using Canvas LMS and Canvas Catalog since 2017.

You are right to observe that we use the Catalog as a platform for the people within our organisation with an existing Canvas account to browse and enrol to courses.

We are a special needs school focusing on serving students on the autism spectrum. Our school is suported by our parent charity.

To better cater to our students' learning needs, our eLearning Team developed online learning courses focusing on different varieties of life skills, and made them available to our students and educators to enrol, This aligns with our organisation's goals and national direction to leverage on digital technology to promote an independent lifelong learning culture.

Hence, we need a platform to help us showcase the available courses we developed and make them available to our our students and educators free of charge:

• List and describe courses
• Track enrolment of courses (tight integration with Canvas LMS)
• Track learning progress (Combination of Catalog Analytics & Canvas Analytics)
• Assign certificate upon completion of learning (Promote learner's engagement)
• Bundling courses up as a program to create learning pathways.

Our needs are more than just course listings. Hence Canvas's Public Course Listing feature do not meet our needs.

As our courses are only available to our own students and educators within our organisation, free of charge, we do not need the features related to paid courses:

• Shopping Cart or Basket
• Payment Gateway
• Public account registration
• Public enrolment

Hope you understand our use case and our reasons to request for the ability to switch off the above features.

We just need Catalog to function like a course catalog with tight integration with Canvas LMS to manage course enrolments. No shopping cart features needed.

To help you understand our background, here are some website for your reference:

• Our Catalog: https://www.learnforlife.sg
• Out Canvas Instance: https://lms.learnforlife.sg
• Our School Website: https://www.pathlight.org.sg
• Our Parent Charity: https://www.autism.org.sg 

Thanks so much for reading my lengthy post.

[rmurchshafer]

Daniel,

Thanks for the context, that all makes perfect sense and it sounds like a good setup for what you are doing. 

Specific to your question from last week, "Will restricting enrollment prevents the "registration form" from appearing?"  Have you tried this and if so what were your results?  Have you reached out to support at all about this since it appears to be change of behavior and is not working as you expected it would work?   Have you spoken with your CSM about this?  From my experience if you have an open ticket with support about things like this and then work with your CSM you might get better traction on fixing the issue.  While your scenario as outlined above makes perfect sense, I don't know how many others use the system in that way and thus I don't know how many "votes" you are going to get going this route as an Idea.  But it will get my vote, especially with the additional explanation of how you use Catalog and why this is important.

Rick

[danielcktan]

Hi Rick, 

Thanks for understanding.

I will be trying out the implemented ideas as highlighted by @KristinL to see if that helps to hide the registration forms from appearing when users try to switch accounts at the catalog's course enrolment confirmation page. (See screenshot from my original post)

I have a hunch that may not work for all our users, especially for our students, as their login id is not their email address but their student id. Many of them are too young or not ready to own an email address responsibly.

Will share my findings here once the testing is done. 

Thereafter, I will reach out to my CSM to discuss the issue. At their end, they will always ask if I have already raised an idea on the community and they need the link to my idea or support ticket number to follow up with the developers.

[KristinL]

Hi! I'm returning to this Idea -- @danielcktan, what should we do with this thread? The Community Team would like to move your proposal out of Moderating and into Open or Archived. Do you feel the resources and the collaboration with your CMS allowed you to create a plan? Is there something you're still working on? An update would be really helpful. Thank you!