Nickname a course title

[nuvlg721]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote Wed. July 1, 2015 - Wed. October 7, 2015  Learn more about voting...

At our institution, we don't allow instructors to rename their courses, so they are stuck with long and sometimes ugly course names. We don't allow them to rename because we don't want to mess up courses with new data coming from the student system. Would it be possible to allow instructors to provide a nickname for a course, the way a bank allows users to nickname an account? Ideally, it would be visible to the instructors, students, and admins, but the "real" course name would appear in reports and the nickname would not be affected by the new data coming from the student information system.

  Comments from Instructure

This idea has been completed.  For more information please review the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-11-21)

[ztoups]

Even when the naming scheme looks reasonable, it's still not necessarily usable. Ours fall somewhere between these two examples and faculty cannot change them; they have been decided upon somewhere higher up in the university. Our official names are year-semester-department-number-section-title:

2015 Fall - C S-485-M01-USER INTERFACE DESIGN Fall 2015

Which, from an objective standpoint (guess my background and/or credentials from the course above), is almost the least usable name you could design (which I have argued against). Not only does it lead with information that is already provided elsewhere (semester, year), but it includes information that will likely never be used on a day-to-day basis (course number). Finally, the information that is needed is in all capitals, which is known to decrease readability. Also, since it's at the end, it, in many cases, just becomes "...".

I have finally resorted to wasting a lot of time writing a javascript injector to find the long course names and replace them with quickly human-readable ones, so the above, in my browser, becomes:

UID Fall 2015

However, this frequently does not work, since, like most websites, Canvas uses a variety of styles. Plus, it basically means I have to have an script run each time my browser loads a new Canvas page. It will break any time Canvas updates its CSS. Finally, it doesn't impact anything canvas does on its backend, like sending notification emails.

A reasonable solution is to just let people provide an alias name that appears in the Canvas interface for that particular user (basically a proper implementation of what I did myself). Institutions can operate how they want, users can make their experience usable. The implementation is nearly trivial, it should require one extra database column on the back-end and a little bit of UI work.

[csalazar]

I have good news about this request. One of our engineers was able to build this feature in our most recent Hackweek. When it is available in production, users will be able to nickname a course to whatever is meaningful to them. Look for more details in the beta release notes in the next release or two.

[kona]

Not really happy about this. Will there be an option to allow or not allow this for an institution at the admin level? If I'm (or Canvas support) is masquerading as a user and trying to provide help or figure something out it could be difficult (and a time waster) to figure out which course is which, especially if someone gets cute with their nickname.

Imagine if someone calls for help and when we ask them what class they give their nickname because they don't remember the real course name/number (and yes, this happens now and they have to check Canvas for the real name). This could waste a lot of Help Desk time and add a layer of frustration for everyone. 

This is not an issue on our campus because we designed a solid naming scheme that provides the information students and faculty need to easily know which course is which. In our almost three years of using Canvas we've tweaked things to work best for our faculty/students (based on feedback) and it will be not cool/good if this creates an issue that was previously a non-issue.

PLEASE have this as a checkbox option for admins to allow/not allow at their institution.

P

[Stef_retired]

I concur with Kona on this. Our school also spent our first few semesters after adopting Canvas struggling with naming schemes before we came up with something everyone could readily understand and use. I shudder to think of help desks trying to elicit course information from students who have nicknamed their courses, or an admin troubleshooting by masquerading as a student (or as a teacher, hey, it can happen) only to see a bunch of nicknames only understandable to the user ("My hardest course" or "Morning course").

The original feature request reads,

Ideally, it would be visible to the instructors, students, and admins, but the "real" course name would appear in reports and the nickname would not be affected by the new data coming from the student information system.

I like the idea of users--teachers and students alike--being able to "nickname" their courses, but from an institutional perspective, it needs to be in a manner that allows a nickname in addition to the official name rather than a substitute for it. And ideally, it should be an option that is enabled at the admin level.

[kmeeusen]

I have to agree with Kona!

As LMS admin and support, we originally let our teachers change course names, then struggled to find those courses because of their cutesy names. We turned off that permission, and life is good. Our primary identifier is our four digit course ID, our naming convention keeps the term up front, which is very important for faculty after a few quarters of courses collect in their Canvas course list. If this feature was made available, I would want the ability to turn it off.

And as a final note, the "Courses" link in the new UI does not truncate the names, so it is hardly an issue anymore.

[straussi]

I have to chime in here as well. We have worked very hard with faculty and staff to come up with understandable, and Canvas 'display-ready' course names. Any changes by faculty (or especially students) will make assistance and support very difficult. We allow our faculty to use the SIS to 'group' their course sections into as many or as few 'course sites' as they wish already.

[kmeeusen]

 @straussi ​

Thanks for chiming in. New users and faculty do not grasp what a nightmare changing course names represents for LMS admins and support. I have no problem with nicknames if the functionality can be toggled off at the account level and if the nickname only appears in the user's course list, but otherwise this is very bad juju!:smileyshocked:

[James]

I agree with stefaniesanders​. If the nickname was in addition to the official name, it would solve the problem and provide the best of both worlds: Usable by the student / teacher and identifiable by support.

It should follow these rules

• If there is no nickname, then just display the official name as it currently is
• If there is a nickname, then display it with first with a larger font and the official name second in a smaller font and perhaps a dimmer shade or italics or both.
• The short name should remain the one the institution picks and not anyone's nickname.

I am not opposed to having it universally turned on as long as the official name is always displayed alongside the nickname.

Are you planning on using nicknames anywhere other than the Course list? We could provide input on whether that was a good or bad idea.

[Chris_Hofer]

Deactivated user​...

We allow our instructors to change the name of the course.  However, for us as admins, this starts to "muddy the waters" when we need to help our faculty with course/student questions.  Most of the time, I am asking our instructors for a CRN (Course Reference Number) or the Canvas Course ID number so I can get to a course quickly.  Our course names are pulled into Canvas from our Banner SIS, but inside of Canvas, they do not display a course number next to them (example: 123-456-78900).  So, because we are allowing our faculty and adjuncts to rename their courses, there are a variety of ways they are doing this...with no consistency across the College.  Some append words to the beginning or end of the title such as "online", "traditional", "Monday", "Thursday", "afternoon", "evening", etc. in order to determine which course is which.  I've seen some instances, too, where characters have been added to the front of a title so that it is better ordered in their own course list (but this doesn't mean it's going to be ordered the same for a student).

Like others who have commented here recently, I am not in favor of having nicknames for courses.  It further "muddies the waters"...even after an instructor has re-named his/her course.  I share many of the same concerns as  @kona ​ and stefaniesanders​.

[Stef_retired]

Deactivated user, please say thanks to the engineer who used his Hackweek time to develop this!