Drag Courses on Dashboard

[jcrawford]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

I would like to be able to rearrange the layout of the courses on my dashboard by clicking and dragging them into a different order.  I may want to order them alphabetically, by the way they fall in my schedule, those that require the most time and/or effort, etc.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-15947 .

Featured Community Contribution:  James Jones

I've written a script that will allow people to sort their Dashboard Course Card list using drag and drop. It can be installed by the individual user or by a Canvas Admin at the institution level.

Sorting Dashboard Course Cards

It currently does not work with the Canvas Apps.

[peter_vanduffel]

Pleaaaaase.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi peter.vanduffel...

Have you checked out the link that  @James ‌ provided (above)?  He's got a slick way to do this right now.  It's not part of the "core" Canvas product, but we've implemented it at our account level so that all users can move their course cards around whenever they want.

[peter_vanduffel]

Hello Chris

Thanks for the feedback.

A colleague of mine tried it, but he told me that, when you closed canvas and started it up again, the changes had disappeared.

Kind regards

Peter Vanduffel

[Chris_Hofer]

Hmmm...that shouldn't be the case (right,  @James ?).  According to his documentation, "When cards are dragged to their new location, the current sort order is automatically saved."  Has your colleague tried clearing browser cache/history, exiting the browser, and then using James' "Canvancement" again?

[James]

In theory, it should work that way.

There's someone who said that when they had courses from multiple instances of Canvas on their dashboard it wasn't working. Is that a possibility? There are some diagnostic tips in a message from last week about things to look for and network calls, but since I don't have courses at multiple institutions, it's difficult for me to test and debug. I made a note on my board of things that I would like to work on, but there's the other side of the board that contains things that I have to work on and it's longer.

And in a self-hosted environment, all things are possible since there may be custom code that keeps mine from working. An institution may have their own code that sorts it in a different order. They may have disabled custom data. Watching the network traffic as shown in the diagnostic tips link may provide a clue.

[jbrady2]

 @Chris_Hofer ‌ and  @James  I had an issue recently where Firefox appeared to have shut off Greasemonkey due to there being an update available, not certain if I am providing the correct information here. When I checked under add-ons for Firefox, I found it disabled. So, add-ons for Firefox might be the first place to check (or Tampermonkey extension for Chrome if that is what is being used). If that doesn't help, the individual might want to check for a new version in the extensions store.

[James]

 @jbrady2 ,

Thanks for reminding us of the impending doom. That wasn't supposed to happen until November and Firefox 57.  Firefox is changing the way extensions work and any of the old ones -- like Greasemonkey -- get labeled as Legacy and will stop working with FF57. But they might get disabled with 55 or 56, so that is a good place to look. The Greasemonkey blog has announcements, saying that GM 4 is nearly complete.

I have not upgraded to GM4 myself or done any testing, but it looks like most things except perhaps the Photo Roster stuff that doesn't work anyway should continue to work -- I hope.

Chrome forced developers to go through something similar and Tampermonkey says it is compatible with Firefox 57, so switching may be an alternative if something breaks with GreaseMonkey.

[hskinner]

Hello - At the very least, provide a temporary solution so our studies and teaching efforts are not so frustrating. For example, allow sort by the "nickname" we give it. If you can't add the option to sort then at least change the default setting (sort by course number <- not a useful default sort) to sort by nickname (<-- very useful and functional!).

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi hskinner‌...

Have you checked our  @James ‌' document called Sorting Dashboard Course Cards?  That might be a temporary solution for you while we wait for Instructure to develop something like this as part of core Canvas.

[Hildi_Pardo]

Canvas is supposed to help us Personalize instruction.   Having the ability to re-order your course tiles is definitely one way of allowing personalization.