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)

[scottdennis]

This feature idea is now open for voting.

[nuvlg721]

To clarify: the nickname should be displayed ALONG WITH the regular course title received from the student system.

[millerjm]

Would this be displayed to only the one user, or update it for every member of the class? 

[kkr255]

Would prefer to have this for ALL members of the class including faculty.  Our current assigned course names make it extremely hard to find courses in drop down lists and/or on mobile devices.

[nuvlg721]

Right - thank you, Kristin, for clarifying.

[millerjm]

Having the ability for admins to turn on/off this permission, or make it for the teacher only, and not visible for the student, would be important to our instituion.  We have make our course names in a very readable, standardized, format and would not want the faculty renaming the courses for the students, but if it were just for their reference, that would be OK. 

[csalazar]

nuvlg721​,

Is the core problem here that course names are getting overwritten from SIS imports, or do you not like the way course names are formatted in the SIS which makes it difficult for students and faculty to navigate Canvas? Are there specific places where you think it would be most valuable for teachers and students to see the nicknames?

Also can you describe how you currently use the Course Name, Course Code, and SIS ID#s when referencing courses? I'm sorry for the barrage of questions, but this detail will be very helpful in thinking about the variety of ways we could address the core problem.

Thank you,

Cosme

[nuvlg721]

Cosme:

This will be a two part answer - one now and one shortly.

Two answer the first question, about the core problem: The problem, as I see it, is that course names that appear in Canvas are unwieldy (sometimes) - they can get awfully long. So the home page and navigation area end up looking like this (or worse):

• 
  
• Many faculty refer to their courses by a shorthand - "Conducting 393" or "Chamber Orchestra" - and it would be nice if there were a way they could designate that shorthand, which could then be used in the 3 places you see above (left nav, top breadcrumb, course name) and in their courses drop down list (both in the top nav above and in their inbox/email):
• 
• 
• (for the faculty member in the IMC courses, the shortening of the course names in the email interface means she has to guess which course is which, since the distinguishing factor is the section number, which is hidden by the elipses).

When I use my bank account info online, I'm given the option of seeing account numbers or nicknaming accounts. When I nickname an account, the interface shows me "Account (...1234) Savings" or "Account (...1234) Bobby". Then, when there are multiple accounts, if I need to transfer from Savings to Bobby, I don't need to remember which account is which - I see some of the account number and the nickname I've given it.

I need to check in with the people who wrote the software to bring in the course name information to answer you second set of questions, so I'll get back to you shortly on those.

[kona]

Isn't this more of an Institutional issue? Not every Institution has this problem and it seems like it has to do with the naming scheme put in place by Canvas Admins/Programmers. Our long ugly name gets reserved for our SIS ID, but we create a nice pretty name (that's standardized) for the course name and course code - which is what shows up for Students and Instructors.

[nuvlg721]

Cosme:

Here's part two of the answer to your second set of questions:

Also can you describe how you currently use the Course Name, Course Code, and SIS ID#s when referencing courses? I'm sorry for the barrage of questions, but this detail will be very helpful in thinking about the variety of ways we could address the core problem.

Right now, our synchronizer calculates a course code from the SIS information, then concatenates the course code and the course title to make the course name (such as the ones you see in the screen shots above). We don't want this information to go away or be overwritten by the feed.

SIS ID#s do not display in many places (just in the list of all the courses). We concatenate them by using the term number and the course number information coming from the SIS feed. We don't want this overwritten, either.

Let me know if that helps.