Course Naming Convention

[EmilyGold]

Hello Canvas Community,

Our district team is currently re-evaluating our course naming conventions in Canvas, and we’re looking to learn from others who have already established effective practices. Specifically, we’re interested in hearing from districts that use Canvas integrated with Infinite Campus.

We’d love to know:

• What naming conventions have worked well for you?

• What challenges or pain points have you encountered?

• How do your naming conventions support teachers, students, and parents in navigating courses more easily?

If possible, we’d especially like to connect with Colorado districts, but we welcome input from anyone with experience.

Thank you in advance for sharing your insights and lessons learned!

[melodyc_lam]

@EmilyGold Welcome! I'm in North Carolina but our district just went through a SIS conversion to Infinite Campus so I had the opportunity to evaluate naming conventions on our side and dictate how we want our names to be moving forward with Infinite Campus.

For some background knowledge: We're a very large district that utilizes blueprinting and a lot of programming/scripting to make things work properly, so our course names are quite long. We're also 1-many, which means for each course code/teacher combination, a course gets created and all the sections they teach go under this one course.

Our current naming convention is:

[Course Name] - [Term] - [Teacher] [(Course Code)]

Example: Social Studies Grade 5 - YL - Doe (40052Z0800) 

We do not have school names as part of the course name. This is because we organize our courses in school subaccounts, so the courses are mapped to the subaccount as they get created. I HIGHLY suggest having school subaccounts if you don't have them already, even if your district is small.

This naming convention helps as our students use the 'dashboard card' view and there's a limited amount of space for titles. Having the course name comes first makes it easy for students to locate which course they need to access. As parents see the same view for students, it helps them out with quickly accessing a particular course.

Having the term come second helps with teachers identifying which course to work on currently. We mostly have semester/year long courses, so our terms are S1, S2, YL (year long) or Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 for the rare course that is only 1 quarter long.

This also helps me as a Canvas Admin with searching up courses by course code, name, or by teacher, especially with crosslisting.

Challenges

Having the teacher name is nice, but we sometimes have primary teacher/teacher combinations (co-teaching) so both of their names show up on the course name. This makes the name really long.

Because our institution is so large and has about 10 years worth of Canvas data in it, without strict organization and processes it becomes very very hard to search up for courses.

Suggestions

• If you mainly use the dashboard card view to access courses, having unique Course Images helps with students quickly identifying courses.
• Test out the 'parent' view on the Canvas Parent App with a student so you can see how parents navigate through the app. That will help with making sure your naming convention makes sense.
• Don't forget about your admin experience -- as your instance of Canvas grows larger, it becomes even more paramount to have an easy way to search up and identify courses. My district's instance is 10 years old and it has become almost impossible to search up courses unless I have the name of the course and know where it's located.
• If you want a consistent experience with course names, turn off the ability for teachers to rename their courses.

Hope this helps!

[dbrace]

Just curious @melodyc_lam, because someone else might come across this:

What format do you use for:

• course_code
  • sometimes referred to as "short_name"
  • appear appears in the upper-left corner of Canvas when in the course and underneath the course card/image
• sis_course_id (sometimes referred to as "course_id")
• integration_id

While I am not at a large school district, for my needs, I find those to be important for admins.

-Doug

[melodyc_lam]

@dbrace Great question! All of this is handled by our SIS integration, but here's how they're set up:

course_code/Short Name: Course Name (Course Code)

sis_course_id: [year] - [subaccount SIS ID] - [term number from the SIS] - [course ID from the SIS] - [teacher GUID from the SIS]

integration_id: this is NULL for courses. Integration IDs are set to GUID for users and I believe there's also an integration ID for sections for grade passback purposes.