Canvas Mobile Apps, Not Just for Students & Teachers Anymore?

mjennings · ‎03-27-2019

From the outset I hope everyone know how much I love Canvas. I love the mobile apps. They are great and people like @peytoncraighill @rseilham an @KristinL do an outstanding job covering and promoting the app(s). First there was the Canvas app. Then SpeedGrader, Polls and Magic Marker. Next up was the Parent app and then finally the Teacher app. I have been a part of the Canvas family for five years now and I have seen so much grow in the mobile strategies.

However, since my role is that of a Sub-Account Admin, I just don't get a lot of use out of the mobile apps. I do not teach and I am not a student, which leaves me with having to login through Safari when I am out of the office and get that frantic email from a faculty member that something isn't quite right in their course. If you haven't tried using Canvas through the mobile browser, particularly on a smaller screen phone, you may not be quite aware of how cumbersome it can be.

I would love for the great folks at Canvas to maybe make a new addition to the app family. To help those of us that support our faculty and students. To help use get out from behind the desk and be out there with them when they need us.

I guess the the question then is what would that look like?

Well... I think that it would have to work a lot like the teacher app. Maybe just replace the To Do option on the bottom of the screen with the Admin option as the To Dos are typically course related and not "real" to dos for the Admin. I know some people may be both, but that is why this would just be used for those administrative tasks and not for teaching. You would still have the teacher app for that.

Here are some quick mock-ups I made this morning:

Home screen with a quick link to the Admin area on the bottom tool bar.

Admin page that lets you select which Account/Sub-Account to view.

The Account/Sub-Account page.

The Courses drop-down menu could load the navigation menu as a selection option.

I know it is much easier to make the mock-ups then it is to make the app, but I think there are many Canvas admins that would love to be able to work through an app then through the mobile browser.

What say you CMUG? Is it time for a Canvas for Admins app?

peytoncraighill · ‎03-27-2019

Thanks for posting this, @mjennings !

I had a call last week with an admin asking for the same thing -- though this person was specifically interested in the ability to create global announcements from mobile. I was (am) a little wary of lowering the barriers to posting global announcements because of the noise it could introduce, but I think the concept of on-the-go Canvas administering is cool.

One challenge we'd have to hash out is which admin functions to provide...because there are a lot of them. From the K-12 perspective, maybe it's a principal or instructional coach walking between classrooms for informal observations or offering support to students. From the HE perspective, maybe it's an instructional designer tweaking some assignment setting for an instructor.

One area of potentially useful overlap is an analytics dashboard (in other words, What's the happs with Canvas at my school today? -- with drill-able metrics for login count, most active courses, most popular tools, number of support tickets created, etc.).

Lots we could investigate. Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

mjennings · ‎03-27-2019

Thanks for the response @peytoncraighill As far as the types of functionality I need, it would definitely include being able to pop into courses to adjust setting or fixing some page content (html editing would be amazing). It would also be helpful to be able to add people, build groups, check the page view logs. Being able to send an announcement to our sub-account would also be great, but understand the hesitation.

Thanks again for taking the time to address this today!

rseilham · ‎03-30-2019

@peytoncraighill ‌ -

I have always thought that if you don't put enough time into making a fairly complete admin app, it won't be used, but if you put a lot of work behind it, it could be awesome for a small group of users - which I'm curious if they'd even use the app for most functions.

With that, I think bundling in some admin type features into the Canvas Student (and maybe Teacher app) could be beneficial. I would like to have the ability to do the following - as I find myself running back to the computer when using the Canvas apps.

Search for and access courses within the sub-accounts I can access.
Search for users within the sub-accounts I can access.
Invite users to a class.

I'm not a super admin but have some admin abilities - so maybe I'm not the best to ask, but that's my opinion.

lindalee · ‎07-05-2019

Oh! I would LOVE admin capabilities within the Canvas mobile apps! One of the things that always frustrating is not being able to search for and find a course that I'm not already enrolled in. This means that, to see if there's a problem with how something appears on a mobile app, I need to either invite myself to the course, or I need to masquerade as someone who's in the course. (And masquerading requires entering the user's Canvas user ID number is, so that task almost always requires looking up from a web browser.)

So I'll echo what Ryan Seilhamer suggested -- searching for courses, searching for users, and inviting users to a class are definitely top priorities.

Beyond that, I'd be happy with the same set of features already present in Canvas Student and Canvas Teacher -- though I would like teachers/admins to be able to see unpublished courses in Canvas Student!

Adding "Search Courses" and "Search Users" under the "Act as User" option in the mobile apps' global navigation menu would be a welcome addition!

rseilham · ‎07-21-2019

@mjennings ‌,

Lots of good discussion about this at InstructureCon with the mobile team. I hope we'll see some of these features implemented in the future to make life better for not only admins but for the awesome people at our schools who support Canvas!