How Can an Instructor Make Canvas Course Home/Front Page Fill Screen By Hiding Right Todo Sidebar?

[LMH3]

CONTEXT: My university requires that we use a Canvas course to present our faculty or tenure promotion dossiers. Unfortunately, as the first group of candidates to have to do this, I'm finding Canvas to be a real pain for this use. It's not working well at all to get my documents organized neatly, most specifically, I'm struggling to get the Home Page to look simple and plain. As it is now, when the uni enters to review my dossier, they'll just see a bunch of student-based programming assistance (like navigation menus, sidebars, and reminders) jutting into the screen. Please help!

THE MAIN ISSUE: I've set my Course Home Page to be an image that is supposed to span the entire front page. The size of this image is critical. When I view the page in Pages, it appears correct and does show the entire correctly sized image. However, when I click on the left navigation menu "Home," the front page that I actually see there is completely shrunken, making it next to impossible to see the image properly. This seems to be caused by the Course right sidebar that includes Course Status and Todos. The image on my Front Page gets shrunk to make room for this ridiculously large right sidebar. I see that others have already asked about the ability to hide this sidebar, but I don't see any recent responses from CanvasLMS or any new updates.

Can I enter some HTML code that could allow my Front Page to overlap the sidebar when it is in Home?

*Note that I cannot get access to my admin to correct this in Javascript/Course Settings. (Nor do I have permission to change this.) I just need a quick way to override the sidebar.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @LMH3,

Unfortunately, I don't think there is going to be a way around this without using some theme CSS/JS, which you already stated you do not have access to (and would probably apply to many courses, not just the shell you've been given.

I know many schools/institutions want to get the maximum value from Canvas, but sometimes using it for purposes it wasn't really designed for can lead to some issues like this.  It almost seems like a portfolio would have been a better way to approach this instead of using a Canvas course, but that decision wasn't made by neither you nor me, and we don't have the ability to change it either.  Hopefully your reviewers will be lenient in this first year of using Canvas for this purpose and some guidance can be developed to help people doing this again next year.

-Chris