[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!

[James]

I was approached during InstructureCon 2019 and asked to write a user script that would provide the functionality described. While not as good as having Canvas build something, it's available now for those who can use it.

https://community.canvaslms.com/people/james 

[ronlembke]

Why on Earth is this not already a thing??

I would like to sort by

- course number

- course prefix

- date of creation, or semester of course

Any of these would be good.

[jdaggs]

I would like to be able to have some sort of folder so I can put the like courses together, etc. 

[ChrisMedina]

Are your schools not using term dates so older courses get put in previous enrollments? That seems to help. 

[rpeters3]

It doesn't help much when you have many years of at least three terms per year with instructors teaching 2 - 4 classes per term. You can see a post from a professor, Justin Hicks, at our institution above with a screenshot of his "past enrollments" section and it's massive.  If you're trying to look for a course only taught once every two years, it's quite the list to wade through. Being able to sort by course name or term or last access will really help instructors find material or look up work for a student asking for a letter of rec or a myriad of reasons.

[ronlembke]

This just seems like such a basic feature, and one that should be trivially easy to add, that no voting or grass-roots rallying of support should be needed. I really can't understand why this hasn't been done years ago. You can see why this would make you look unresponsive.

[ChrisMedina]

We have a retention policy that allows us to delete courses after a year and a term. I usually don't delete until closer to 2 years. this helps with not having so much junk in canvas. 

[wayex001]

Come on, Canvas, this has been up here for almost two years. Make the course list sortable.

[jmc6]

Ha! I have been fighting for this for more than 2 years. Canvas does not do ANYTHING that we ask. Canvas is a horrible program.

John M. Cimbala

Professor of Mechanical Engineering

234 Reber Building

University Park, PA 16802

jmc6@psu.edu<mailto:jmc6@psu.edu>, 814-863-2739

www.me.psu.edu/cimbala<http://www.me.psu.edu/cimbala>;

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free"

[cholling]

I'm sorry you feel that way about Canvas. I've worked through 3 different LMS in my career at the university and Canvas is, by far, the most intuitive for my faculty and students, and the most responsive to user requests from those audiences as far as functionality. It's not perfect, not by a long-shot, but it continually improves -- with some functionality better than others, admittedly. The community is the only one of its kind that I've been involved with - I've never see a more lively, helpful, friendly group of support around a product ever. I often wish that some of the requests I've made or read were implemented with greater speed, but having at least minimal background in systems design and development, I recognize the enormous amount of time, resources, and people that are needed to flesh out a request, design, test, implement, test, test, test, and document, I find it amazing that we have the tools that we do and that they function as effectively as they do. When I step back to look at just the number of requests that have been made through the community and the number that have been or are being developed, I find it amazing. I tend to look at a request and think "that is simple. I could really use that tomorrow" and never stop to think that what looks simple on the outside is extremely complex on the inside to make it function fluidly and with every other component it touches and that mine is only one of thousands.

I guess you touched a nerve. I'm off my soapbox now. Best wishes for your ideal LMS.