Course visibility in users' dashboards

[jdurancal]

Hi community!

We would like to know if it’s possible to configure a course so that it does not automatically appear on the user dashboard when it is created.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[DrTerriC]

You could always wait to publish the course when you want it to appear..  Or you could make it start on a certain date. That is under settings.. 

date under settings

[jdurancal]

Hi Terri,

Thanks again for your reply, and apologies if I wasn’t clear in my previous message.

For the past three terms, we’ve been managing around 5,000 semester-based courses with 80,000 students and 4,000 instructors, so we’re quite familiar with the course creation, publishing, and user enrollment processes.

We’re trying to find out whether there’s a way to prevent a published course, with active enrollments, from appearing on the users’ Dashboards so that it remains hidden despite being technically accessible.

Any guidance or best practices on this would be much appreciated.

Best regards,
Jordi

[dbrace]

Hi @jdurancal,

Without knowing how you are creating Canvas course shells, it sounds like you are publishing them when they are created.

At my institution, we:

1. create courses with dates using a CSV file
2. do not publish our courses when they are created
3. enroll faculty into the courses as "teacher" using a CSV file
4. enroll students into the course as "student" using a CSV file
5. faculty are able to access the courses after they are created
6. students are not able to access the courses until (1) they are published and (2) the course dates are in effect

How are you creating your courses?

-Doug

[jdurancal]

Hi Douglas,

Thanks again for your reply, and apologies if I wasn’t clear in my previous message.

For the past three terms, we’ve been managing around 5,000 semester-based courses with 80,000 students and 4,000 instructors, so we’re quite familiar with the course creation, publishing, and user enrollment processes.

We’re trying to find out whether there’s a way to prevent a published course, with active enrollments, from appearing on the users’ Dashboards so that it remains hidden despite being technically accessible.

Any guidance or best practices on this would be much appreciated.

Best regards,
Jordi

[dbrace · Accepted solution]

Hi @jdurancal / Jordi,

Thank you for the additional context.

My institution is not nearly the size of yours but something to consider before I give a possibility. Even if a course is not visible on their Dashboard, courses will also be visible in the "All Courses" list ( How do I view all my Canvas courses? - Instructure Community - 618766 ).  Maybe that is your intention but if you intention is completely hide access, I do not believe that is possible.

With that said, I believe the only way you would be able to manipulate the list of favorites that are decided by individual users would be to use a mix of API endpoints/calls from these three resources (and possibly others):

1. Users - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation
2. Favorites - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation
3. Masquerading - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation

While it might not be an exact answer, I hope this helps you.

-Doug

[petern]

That is how I would do it.  This would make sure the course didn't appear on the dashboard.  There are some things to consider when doing this however:

• If a student hasn't selected any favourites, then you'll need to make all current courses favourites with the exception of this one.
• It might be worth checking what happens when a student is enrolled into a new course - will that need to be favourited as well
• The course will still appear in "all courses" 
• The student will still get notifications for the course

Lastly, there is another way that you could make the course disappear - you can use custom JS to remove that particular course.  However that may only work on the web.

[dbrace]

Those are some good additional considerations, @petern.

Like @Hildi_Pardo, I would be curious to know more about this scenario. In my opinion, using all of these tweaks/customizations, falls under something sometimes referred to as "security by ignorance" and a user that is knowledge about computers/technology will find a way around hiding the course and will probably lead to additional problems down the road.

-Doug

[Hildi_Pardo]

Hi @jdurancal  -- can you tell us a little more about the scenario that you have that you want the course to not be visible on the dashboard but still accessible?

Our district uses a combination of Terms (which adds the start/end dates) and having course UnPublished by default.   After that the teachers then have control of Publishing the course when they are ready for students to view, and if they want to allow students to see their courses prior to the start date, they can change the course Participation from "Term" (which uses the Term dates) to Course (where the teacher can manually add an earlier start date, and needs to enter an end date as well).

There are often different case scenarios at different districts or institutions, so it's always interesting to learn about those, and also interesting to see how different districts manage their LMS.

[jdurancal]

Hi Hildi,

The scenario is that we create a parallel course for the final exam, and this new course is linked from within the continuous assessment course.

Since we manage a large number of courses, some users end up with many courses on their Dashboard. To reduce this clutter, we're planning to embed or link the final exam course within the continuous assessment course, and we'd like to prevent other direct access methods.

Thank you for your guidance.

Best regards,
Jordi

[dbrace]

Thank you for describing the scenario, @jdurancal/Jordi.

-Doug

[Hildi_Pardo]

Gotcha!  That makes sense!    

Without trying to figure out a script or something outside of Canvas, I might just opt for providing a video that shows students how they can manage their Dashboard:  drag and drop their course cards to put the most relevant on top; show them how to Favorite and Unfavorite.      

Have they complained of having too many courses on their dashboards and being confused?

[jdurancal]

Not only students, but also teachers experience this, especially those managing large subjects. We have subjects in a single semester with around 1,500 students, which typically results in about 11 separate course shells for that subject. That’s where the confusion and overload often come from.