[Dashboard] Link for ALL COURSES on the Dashboard

[gnoack]

An ALL COURSES link should be added to the Dashboard.  Either below the course cards, or in the right side navigation. 

Students sometime call during the first days of the semester because they cannot find their current courses.  I believe this happens for students who had Favorited courses to the Dashboard during the first week of their school year, but now those courses are unpublished and the new semester courses need to be Favorited. When they open the Dashboard, there are no Course Cards.   Providing a link on the Dashboard to ALL COURSES makes sense.  From a student point of view, they are seeing the courses they want to see first on the Dashboard with one click access to all their courses. 

[mark_proctor]

Sounds like a very useful improvement to me - just seeing some courses is confusing some students.

[rkahn]

I endorse Greg Noack's point, which is that if you have a separate Courses link, it should show All Courses right away, not just a redundant list of Favorited courses that Dashboard already shows. What's the point and as other noted, users rarely notice the All Courses link.

Can remove it altogether if the first card on the Dashboard was a link to All Courses.

[dolce]

I'd suggest making it a button/card looking option.

[ekc13b]

We get tons of calls during the first week of classes concerning hidden courses on the Dashboard. Having the "All Courses" link clearly displayed on the Dashboard will help cut down on the volume of those inquiries.

[meichin]

First day of classes.

We are getting a lot of calls about course site recently published not showing up on the dashboard.  Yet the Canvas documentation says:

Note: After you have manually favorited at least one course, Canvas automatically favorites any new published course enrollments for you.

So if they favorited a course last week, this shouldn't be happening, right? 

Even if they didn't star anything, this shouldn't be happening. I don't think they have even messed with their dashboards because they don't look for the all courses link on the courses menu item - and it isn't THAT hard to find, especially if you have been there before to star favorites! 

Is there a glitch or a setting issue anyone knows about?  Does it just take a while to show up?

It should be adding recently published courses to their dashboards from what the documentation states.  Do you think we should just tell them to refresh?

[a_coombs]

I completely agree with the points made here about what users anticipate when they access the Courses icon and the confusion over the Dashboard Card View and favourites/max 20 courses.

In addition, the Canvas Student mobile app Dashboard (card view) has a "View all" link, so there is an inconsistency in the experience between mobile and desktop views, which further adds to the confusion.

[a_coombs]

For info, one of our team here has put together a Javascript customisation that adds "See all courses" in the header of all three dashboard views on a browser:

$('#DashboardOptionsMenu_Container').prepend('<a href="https://-your_institution-/courses" style="color:#bb2c3f;font-weight:bold; padding-right:2em;">See all courses</a>')

We've only just applied this, so have yet to see whether this diminishes the support calls, etc.

[erin_cox]

That's amazing! Could you post some screenshots of what that looks like when implemented? 

[a_coombs]

Sure, no problem (note - in our institution "modules" means the same as "courses" in default Canvas, hence "we've made the link read "see all modules" not "see all courses") :

Card view:

List view:

Recent activity view is basically the same as Card View, so haven't added it

[sonya_mcchristi]

Hi Antony, I've experimented with this on our Beta instance and the link always opened in a new tab, no matter what link target I set in the code. How did you get around that? Thank you.