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]

Those don't look very usable, though at least you get most of the information before it is cut off.

[straussi]

It's what the faculty and staff wanted. There are differences between our online Worldwide campus and residential campuses. This is from a residential instructor, so they know the semester, and want the course ID first. They also know which sections they have combined into course "A" and "B". Any courses from previous semesters they have de-selected from 'favorites' in "View All or Customize".

[ztoups]

Looking forward to this; will make Canvas that much easier to use on a day-to-day basis!

As another data point, I recently needed to compile an annual review (which was based on data from two prior semesters). Any time I needed Canvas data from prior classes, it required multiple read-throughs of the list of a dozen courses to find the three I needed. Nicknames will make this a much easier task next year.

[Stef_retired]

Just thought I'd call attention to the commentary surrounding this feature idea that sounds rather similar to the one under consideration:

[jeremy2]

That's me.  You're welcome.

Some background about the feature: Nicknames appear for the user who created them on the dashboard and in course navigation menus/breadcrumbs and notification emails. One user's nicknames don't appear for anyone else--admins searching for courses will see real names, not nicknames chosen by any teacher or student. Course ID numbers are unaffected and can continue to be used to refer to a course unambiguously. The original course name appears as hover text over the nickname on the dashboard.

I'll work with Deactivated user on how we can further address admins' concerns.

[Stef_retired]

 @jeremy2 , thanks for the clarification of how the nicknaming feature will work. And thank you for taking the time to develop it. You are awesome. :smileylaugh:

[kona]

 @jeremy2 ​, my main concern is that when I masquerade as a student or instructor I need to be able to quickly and easily know which course are which per our original (College wide) naming scheme. In addition, when an Instructor or Student contacts us for support and we ask what course they are talking about they need to be able to refer to the "original" course name - which means we need to be able to quickly and easily explain to them how to see/find the original name.

I'd hugely prefer the option to just turn this feature off globally, but as long as we can still see the original name for courses via this - "The original course name appears as hover text over the nickname on the dashboard" - we should be ok.

[James]

 @kona ​, We are not okay with using the hover as an alternative to displaying it.

The title, alt, and aria-label attributes are not searchable by the browser's Ctrl-F (at least with Firefox). You would have to mouse over every course to find the one you want and some students have many courses. Notice I said mouse-over, I can't even figure out copy/paste on the iPad, let alone how to hover.

[scottdennis]

Thanks for coming to the forums and giving us this additional background info, Jeremy - Much appreciated!

[jeremy2]

The non-searchability of hover text is a good point--I'll bring it up with our UX people.

If your main concern here is still about masquerading as students, however, we could consider just not showing nicknames to masquerading users.