[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!

[cdraney]

It is often frustrating to find a particular past course in the "all courses" page. I'm glad that the courses are at least organized by current, past, and future enrollments. Could that page be made easier to use by formatting it similarly to the list in the course import drop-down box?

It seems to me that it might also be helpful to allow users to sort the table of past, future, and current courses by the data in the columns (of the current layout). 

[cdraney]

Has anyone from Canvas weighed in on this request from nearly THREE years ago? I couldn't see any.

I agree that Canvas is by far the most intuitive LMS out there, but the larger they get, the less responsive they seem to be.

[connorlacey]

My nuiversity names classes very similarly, so I wish I could have some customization ability to the order of how the classes show up on the tab. This would allow me to order the classes in a way that makes sense for me (order of occurrence, class type, class location, etc.)

[jeffaharris]

It would be great to be able to sort all of my courses into folders.  Right now, all of the completed courses come up in a long list and it is difficult to sort through and there is limited organizational ability

[pazehoski]

As the LMS Admin for our university, I've received several requests for this feature. We would also like to see this idea developed. @cdraney  your screenshot is a perfect example of how they SHOULD be listed. Thank you for providing that screenshot. 

So, how can we get this moved up the line for development? 

[mdgeorge2]

With very many past Canvas courses in archive it is difficult to find a past course in the current format. Please arrange for them to be sortable 

[jfisler]

I agree.

[jhicks21]

HOW IN THE BLANKETY BLANK BLANK HAS THIS NOT BEEN FIXED YET!??????????????

It's seriously driving me insane.  I should be able to sort either chronologically, by course, or BOTH.  This simply cannot be that hard, but the failure to implement is costing us huge amounts of time out here as users.  My LMS and IT people have also contacted you MANY MANY times, and are even in this thread.  It's only been 2.5 years since I last posted.  I can't even zoom out on my browser to half the size it would need to be to see all the courses stacked in my prior courses list.  When I want to grab a particular piece of material, or export a former quiz to a current course; it's insanity that I have to wander up and down the list, hoping I can find the correct one.

[Ron_Bowman]

@jfisler @jhicks21 @mdgeorge2 @pazehoski @cdraney @connorlacey @jeffaharris @jdaggs 

The following may not be the panacea you are hoping for, but it helps until Canvas provides something.

There are several java scripts that users can add to chrome to perform various tasks.

These scripts are Canvancements - found here: 
https://github.com/jamesjonesmath/canvancement
Read the information below the list of scripts for the explanation by James.

The one script you may find useful is the one titled courses -> all courses.  Here is the link:
https://github.com/jamesjonesmath/canvancement/tree/master/courses/all-courses
This script provides a search box at the top of each column in the all courses view.  You can then type in whatever criteria you want to search on - any substring will be found (i.e for the course name column just type in your course number and you will see all courses with that number in them)  For term type in the year and just see those courses.  Here is a screen shot of my all courses page with the script running - there are other classes, I just showed the first 3

Have fun playing with the other scripts in Canvancements (I recommend rubric sorter if you use rubrics, QuizWiz is a must).  As far as I can tell there are no ill effects from using these.  There are no guarantees provided by James; however he has been here for a long time and provides a lot of useful analysis and responses to questions.  In my opinion there is nothing to worry about using these scripts.

Ron

[jhicks21]

@Ron_Bowman 

Thanks for this.  This is awesome.  

Note: at first use... it's not obvious that you can actually click on the headers to sort.  Which means you CAN do searches with chronological sorting within the search.  That's brilliant!

I still thinks it is completely absurd that we have to use third party scripts through a third part browser plugin.

JH