Reorder Dashboard Boxes

[jen_frye]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

At this time of year, I have both spring and summer courses listed on my dashboard along with some other groups I am involved with.  I use them all regularly.  I would love to be able to reorder the boxes to put the most important/relevant courses at the top of the screen and leave some of the lesser used ones at the bottom.

Comments from Instructure

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

[don_bryn]

How do you have time for all that?  I've been spending a lot of time here, and I can't imagine myself having time to push a good idea through.  And I don't really LIKE being a politician.  🙂

[kona]

It actually only takes a few minutes for each type - Twitter, post to a Canvas Community group and then share it with other groups. Literally all that could be done in under five minutes if you knew what you wanted to say.

And no, can't say I'm a fan of politicians, but if I'm passionate enough about a specific idea or group of ideas then I find it worth it to me. 

In most cases the things that really bug people easily get over 100 votes. It's the smaller more boutique or very specific things that languish because people don't even think about it rather than they don't think it's a good idea. A little something in their ear normally goes a long way to getting the vote! 🙂

[smckeon]

This concept has gathered support multiple times through multiple threads and "topic headers" . 

Reordering the list of courses on Grades Tab

How do I reorder the course tabs on my Dashboard?

This is definitely something instructors want, we've just been having timing issues to get it to a vote.  Time to rally!

[ebelsan]

Didn't read all comments above but wanted to weight in that this feature would be very helpful to teachers in organizing their days logically.  By editing nicknames, teachers could decide how their classes could be best arranged. I hope Canvas implements this suggestion very soon.

[ronmarx]

After having migrated a 25-module Honors U.S. History course from Blackboard into Canvas, yes, I think this idea has merit!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this idea is closely related to one I put into vote here:

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5982. In it I want some way to select more than one module or elements within modules in order to manipulate them including ordering, opening/closing multiple modules, delete, etc.

Additionally, there's another idea for allowing HTML commenting. Please visit and vote up!

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5941

[mcsmith]

Thank you all for the time you took to contribute to this idea. While we understand the use cases mentioned this is a very large investment. Unfortunately, we have to archive this idea since we wont have enough resources to get this done in the next 6 months.

[awarmar]

Sad Panda face

[jcraig1]

Please can this idea be reconsidered? I currently have 3 different types of courses that I work with and while I have them color coded, I would really appreciate the ability to sort my courses the way I want to see them on my dashboard. If the course list in ALL COURSES could be set up so that the course could be re-ordered that would be absolutely awesome. It appears that this idea has had some traction in the past and there certainly seems to be the desire to do this, is there any chance that you have the capacity to address this issue now?

[James]

 @jcraig1 ​,

Are you running Canvas through the web interface or through the App? If you are accessing it through Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, this is probably something that you could get added to your own system through a user script. Those allow people to make modifications to their own systems that Canvas can't/won't make to the entire system. User scripts aren't as polished as what Canvas would release, and they're often not accessible -- which is something Canvas needs to ensure when they release stuff, but they can be accomplished in a much shorter time. A trade off is that they need installed on every machine and browser that you use, but depending on how important the need is, it might be worth it.

I've written some simple ones, like hiding the URL when printing, to more complex ones like adding enhancements to SpeedGrader.

I can see a couple of approaches one might take with this.

The first is that there is to check and see if you could make it a sortable item. I suspect there is a way, but I haven't explored it. If they can be made sortable, then the issue is saving the results. There is a local storage within the browser that could be used. One could write the script to update the local storage to contain the current order and then check that order when the page is loaded to see if they need re-sorted. That would be specific to that machine and browser, though. And it's possible that the local storage could be wiped out based on your privacy settings and there's a high probability that it wouldn't work if you were using a public machine with a shared login.

The second approach would be to hard-code the order of the course cards into a user script that would then check the order when the page is loaded and re-order them. That's not as flexible and is definitely a user-by-user solution, but it doesn't depend on local storage. It too, would be specific to a single machine and a single browser, but if you installed the script on multiple combinations of machines and browsers then you wouldn't have to reconfigure it. It too would probably not work on a shared machine.

Another possibility to the storage issue is to store your sort order in the user's custom data within Canvas. That would replace the browser's local storage as the place where the information is stored and enable it to work across browser, but only on those places where the user script is loaded. If you go this route, then the institution really needs to decide upon the scope of the information to make sure that your changes aren't accidentally overwritten by something else they're doing. And if you're going that far, then they might want to convert it from a user script to something the put in the global JavaScript file that allows all users at their institution to change the order.

The long term solution, which is what you're asking Canvas to do, is to make them sortable and save the preference somewhere so that it remembers it and then delivers in that order all the time. That's definitely better done on the Canvas side than the user side, but they've said it's not happening anytime soon.

[James]

I've got to clean up the code before I release it, but I've written code that will allow you to sort the dashboard cards. It uses the Canvas custom data API so that it will persist across browsers. Right now, it's a user script, but hopefully it won't take much to convert to JavaScript that could be added to the custom JavaScript for an account.

Currently, there is no interface or added links or buttons. It automatically updates whenever you drag a card to a new position. It puts new courses that are added before any existing courses. It resets any sort order when you get down to a single card (wasn't sure on the best way to do this without an interface).

I'm not sold on this way of doing things, but I was trying to avoid adding extra buttons for "save" and "reset" in case people wanted it to be available to their users through the custom JavaScript and wanted it to "just work".