[Courses] Make the course list sortable

[jmc6]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas LMS

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When you click on Courses and then All Course, Canvas lists them in some random order. As my number of courses builds up over the semesters, with many courses of the same name, I would like to be able to SORT my list of courses by Name, Semester, Recently used, etc.

So... please let us sort these courses so that we can easily find what we are looking for!

[reitsmar]

Can I give this 10 or 20 up votes? Come on people! 'All courses' is just a list; make it sortable by at least columns (e.g., by clicking on the column header (with a little 'up' and 'down' arrow for sort order). Multi-column sorting would be nicer but just single-column sorting would make it so much easier to find old/previous courses.

[nmogul]

I agree. Can I hear 20 more votes? I think we should be reaching out to our colleagues to get some serious traction on this. I promise to recruit 5 more likes by Monday. Others care to beat me? 

[jessie_swigart]

We just adopted Canvas, and this was the FIRST question asked by a faculty member in our training session. Yes, allow for sorting!

[jhicks21]

I understand that many don't teach enough courses to make this a priority; but for teaching faculty, this is vital!  It drives me crazy trying to pull resources from prior courses and having to try and figure out where the courses are in my history, and we've only been on this platform for a short while!

I need to be able to sort by course, not by term.  Please!

[sonya_mcchristi]

I suspect this is going to become an issue for us as we enter into our second academic year with Canvas and will have new instances of most of our module and programme spaces with almost identical names and codes, so the ability to sort in various ways would be much appreciated.

[jbrady2]

This is not a new issue as I submitted this https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4622 back in 2016. As a teaching instructional designer, who teaches students through Canvas, maintains faculty/staff professional development in Catalog, and is often enrolled as an ID in faculty and colleague courses to provide feedback/assistance, my Course list became overrun with courses in a short amount of time. It makes it more and more difficult to find a course quickly in the Course list if it is not one that I keep on my Dashboard. Hopefully this will gain more traction this time around.

[rpeters3]

Not surprising that you did, it's a much needed issue. Not everyone will have access to Cold Storage, where your idea has been stashed. Are there any points of discussion or other information from that thread that you think would be useful here?

[jbrady2]

rpeters3‌ Unfortunately, it only ever gained 9 up-votes, and the only two comments shown are from the Canvas Community moderators, so it was not well supported back when I proposed it. I'm glad to see that it is gaining more support this time around. Hopefully, it will actually get somewhere. I know I still find it an issue any time I need to hunt for a course in my ever-growing course list. At the time I first predicted this could be an issue and proposed this change, I only had ten courses in my Courses page list, today I am up to ninety-two.

[nmogul]

Forward to your colleagues to get more votes on this! 

[nmogul]

EXCELLENT IDEA