[Course Settings] Allow Admin to Set Default Settings for courses

[ebschc]

It would be hugely helpful to district-level Canvas Admins to be able to modify and establish default course settings for course shells created for sections assigned to teacher users.

For example, if a teacher technology advisory committee, school principal, and/or tech department in the school or district determines that all courses published in Canvas for students and observers have settings that differ from the current defaults, then this requires a manual change to each course by the teacher and/or admin depending upon the district's user permissions.

e.g., setting grading schemes, or students rights to view, attach, etc.

e.g., modifying default course navigation menu items to be viewable to students...

I suggest that Canvas develop a feature that would allow an admin to simply set the course settings defaults prior to the creation of courses within subaccounts, manually or via SIS integration.

This feature could be available in one or more of the following locations of the Admin navigation menu:

(a) Courses

(b) Add a New Course

(c) Settings

(d) Subaccounts

[Stef_retired]

 @dboxer ‌, this would be excellent feedback to provide your CSM if you haven't already.

[dboxer]

Thank you for the suggestion stefaniesanders‌

We did share this feedback to the Priority Services K12 team, since we no longer have a dedicated CSM. Ironically, they suggested that we Vote Up this idea. So hopefully, by sharing this request in multiple channels in the organization, it can gain some visibility and traction.  

[jbuchholz]

I was just having this conversation with others at my institution. I was looking at using a Google Sheet like  @James ‌ does with the bulk grade adjuster as I was hoping for a little more high-level ability, but this looks great. I am going to see if we can implement this and tweak it to our needs. Thank you so much for sharing!

[jflint1]

Full agreement. We need faculty overseas to set certain time zones as well as certain navigation for each course. It would be lovely to set these as defaults.

[mredmond]

A long thread with no action yet taken.  It would be extremely valuable for Canvas admins to be able to set course defaults across their entire account, or even better, at the sub-account level. 

[qnguyen]

Hi All,

Was this vote done ? And what was the solution? I would like to find a way to set a set of default menus for all courses. Especially the PEOPLE tab which shows everyone's names who attended the course.

[marco_divittori]

Couldn't agree more. We had the same concern and have resorted to using the API to run a daily script that copies a template course with hidden navigation menu items to all newly created courses.

[qnguyen]

HI Marco,

All I can do right now is using the Live API from Canvas and remove the menu in each course , can't find a way to do it for all courses in batch.

Can you please share your script if possible?

Thanks

{   "id": "people",   "html_url": "/courses/17/users",   "full_url": "https://XXX.beta.instructure.com/courses/17/users",   "position": 5,   "hidden": true,   "visibility": "admins",   "label": "People",   "type": "internal" }

[marco_divittori]

Sure, sent you a DM.

[mkollman]

This is just a bump to keep this topic on the radar as having an option to choose Global/Sub-account Course Settings for an institution would be invaluable for admins and programs.  This way we can set some consistency without going the Blueprint route on every course.  Thanks!