Pagination for Courses List (Admin)

[Nicholas_Farha]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Canvas should paginate the course list in the admin console. To say "There are too many courses to show . . . Please use the finder" can be and often is useless. Why not a "Next-->" button? What if I am not looking for a specific course e.g what if I want to count all of the xyz courses? What if I want to do screen captures to get an alphabetical list of the courses for a term? The way it is set up now is a really poor design.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14284-canvas-production-release-notes-2018-03-10 .

[inspire]

Dave, would you care to share the URL hack? Also, where can we find the course csv report download please?

[dschober]

Try this: 'https://YOURINSTANCE/accounts/1/courses?utf8=%E2%9C%93&focus=course_name&course%5Bname%5D=+&enrollme...'  Replace YOURINSTANCE with yourschool.instructure.com  and TERMNUMBER with the identifier for your term (which is normally the sequence number for when the term was created...ie 1 is the first and normally default term).  This will work as long as your term has less than 201 courses.

Reports are found in the Admin area > Settings > Reports.  You will want to run a 'Provisioning' report...which is basically the only half useful report option set in this area.  When configuring a provisioning report in this instance, I just run one on 'courses' for the term I'm interested in.  It will give you everything course settings related and if you have your sub-accounts all set up with SISIDs, that will show up to make it a little more sortable (we use sub-accounts for different schools).  From that list, you can use the canvas_course_id to access any course.  Same idea as the hack above, YOURINSTANCE/courses/canvas_course_id#  I just wish the reports were a little more customization...like if this could include instructor name and email... but that's another feature request somewhere else that 'on the roadmap' I'm sure.

[cesbrandt]

For those that are interested in getting something like this now, rather than wait for the official functionality, I posted a blog to the Canvas Developers‌ group partially inspired by this idea: Full Course Listing with Sorting and Filtering.

I hope it proves hepful to those waiting to see this officially done.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Thanks for the tip about the script you wrote, cesbrandt‌.  It is too bad that after Cosme Salazar promised in 2015 that this would be done in 6 months, he left Canvas.  Would sure like this to be move onto the development list.  If you could write a script, surely they could learn from you and add this to official development.  This is essential for Admins. 

[James]

I used to think it would be wonderful if Canvas would add that the things I wrote to Canvas and then there wouldn't be a need for me to do it. The more I wrote, though, the more I realized that would be a bad idea and that some things I write don't belong inside the Canvas core.There are some things I can do using external tools like Google Sheets that Canvas could never do within a web interface. There are other things that are so complicated that they won't get put into Canvas because they don't want a bunch of options for every possibility that people can come up with.

As for what Christopher wrote, Canvas is not going to have a web interface that takes 30 seconds or more to load as people won't wait that long. If they do pagination, they're going to do it without loading all of the courses into memory first. What he has done is necessitated by what is exposed to him through Canvas. But if he had control of the entire system, I'm pretty sure he would have done things differently -- like including the instructor information since he could just return it at the same time he returned the courses without making additional API calls. In fact, there wouldn't be any API calls since he would have access to the database.

I understand the sentiment and frustration behind what you're saying, but deciding what goes into the system is a multi-faceted, deeply involved process. There are meetings upon meetings to decide what goes in. Taking time to develop this functionality takes time away from something else. When we met at Project Khaki in April, we were given the task of deciding how to spend 20% of Canvas' engineering budget for the next 6 months. One of the items considered was search enhancements for the admin. It was estimated to take the fewest number of engineering resources, yet when the group of users that Canvas brought in for the day to make the decisions and we were given 5 tasks to vote on, it didn't make the cut. In fact, out of the 40 people, only 2 of them put this in their top 5 choices.

Each person has their own issues that top their priority list and to them, the issues that they face are of paramount importance and they feel that all others should take a back seat. But that's not how to run a company and design a product. That's running in crisis mode and is not sustainable and hurts the long term product.

None of this is to say that the functionality doesn't need improvement. It is meant to say that not every thing a user can do should become part of the Canvas core product. And yes, that includes my stuff too.

[kona]

As an Admin I would desperately like them to fix this. Yet, as an Admin I also realize it's better that they spend their limit resources on developing things that will improve the teaching and learning experience. So things for students and teachers.

To better illustrate this, there's only a few Canvas Admins at our school and only two that are actually impacted by the admin search. But, we have over 150 faculty and 2200+ students using Canvas that are impacted by the things that have been getting the resource dollars - like https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/quizzesnext?sr=search&searchId=f242e295-2f3a-47bb-87...‌.

So, bang for the buck, while I did vote for this and really really wish we had it, I understand why it hasn't been worked on and appreciate that it was even mentioned at Khaki. To me it means it really is on their radar and just maybe might get done sometime in the future. 

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

Thank you  @kona ‌ and  @James ‌ for taking the time to respond.  Very good point, the limited resources for change - of course I want all changes that directly benefit students and faculty too (particularly quizzes so glad it's a priority). Of course decisions about priority have to be made.  I was speaking from my frustration at not being able to see all the courses in our larger sub-accounts or for a semester, but it's not a constant problem, just recurring. Thanks Kona for voting for it. And James you're right that the script has problems precluding including in core.

Are there a good number of admins that attend Khaki? One problem with making changes via popularity voting is that everyone has their own concerns, and those in smaller groups might not get the votes even though for them it's essential.  For example (and I hope this is fixed in new quizzes!) those teaching science have different needs regarding numeric answers and also formatting answers.  Language teachers want a special language characters tool in the RCE.

That said, I do know that sometimes changes are made with few votes because whoever makes decisions sees the necessity.

[kona]

 @Nancy_Webb_CCSF , I'm not sure of the exact ratio at Khaki, but James is a Canvas Admin & Professor of Mathematics and he went this year, and I'm a Canvas Admin and I went in 2015. For more on this (and some funny discussion) see the participant list for this year - Khaki 2017: Attendees.

[stephensda]

Hi James, I don't think a lot of feature ideas make the cut, as you point out...b/c they're not articulated well for the majority of Canvas Community users/voters, namely faculty. I spent a lot of time at Khaki 2.0 explaining (and in some cases, showing the specific UI on my laptop or phone) to folks that didn't fully grasp the verbiage used to describe the feature request...or the ensuing ROI that might result. #justsayin'

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2018-02-26) .