Is there a setting to hide new menu options in the course menu until needed?

[scott_maddeaux]

We have Lucid showing in all of our course nav without us adding it. Is there any way to set a default that any new features are hidden in the course menu until we want to expose it? The same thing happened when installing Badgr, and we had to edit every course that didn't have badging. We have hundreds of courses. 

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @scott_maddeaux ...

If you are a Canvas administrator for your school, you should be able to do this.  Here's how:

1. Click on "Admin" in the left-hand global navigation menu.
2. Click on the name of your school account in the slide-out menu that appears.
3. Click on "Settings" at the bottom left corner of your screen.
4. Click on the "Apps" tab.
5. Click on the "View App Configurations" button on the right side of the screen.
6. Scroll down to the "Lucid Integration" row.
7. Click on the gear/cog wheel icon for that row on the right side of the screen.
8. Select "Placements".
9. You'll see a checkmark next to "Course Navigation".  Click the checkmark to turn it into a "X".  This will inactivate "Lucid" from all courses in your Canvas account.  You could also do this for the "Editor Button" and the "Submission Type Selection" if you wanted.

This is all covered in the following Guide: How do I manage external app placements for a course?

I hope this will help a bit.  Good luck!

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @scott_maddeaux ...

If you are a Canvas administrator for your school, you should be able to do this.  Here's how:

1. Click on "Admin" in the left-hand global navigation menu.
2. Click on the name of your school account in the slide-out menu that appears.
3. Click on "Settings" at the bottom left corner of your screen.
4. Click on the "Apps" tab.
5. Click on the "View App Configurations" button on the right side of the screen.
6. Scroll down to the "Lucid Integration" row.
7. Click on the gear/cog wheel icon for that row on the right side of the screen.
8. Select "Placements".
9. You'll see a checkmark next to "Course Navigation".  Click the checkmark to turn it into a "X".  This will inactivate "Lucid" from all courses in your Canvas account.  You could also do this for the "Editor Button" and the "Submission Type Selection" if you wanted.

This is all covered in the following Guide: How do I manage external app placements for a course?

I hope this will help a bit.  Good luck!

[scott_maddeaux]

Amazing! Thank you so much. 

[mbmacdonald]

Hi @Chris_Hofer (or anyone else who can offer help). I had a similar question - but this is not the answer I am looking for. If you follow these instructions, then no instructor will be able to add Lucid to their Course Nav menu, even if they want to. It will not be available to them.

What I would like to do is make the Lucid Course Nav link disabled by default in Course Nav. Then the instructor could choose to enable it in their own course settings (Navigation tab).

For other LTIs, I have done this by making an API call that ends in course_navigation[default] ="disabled". But that is not working for Lucid. It does not seem to have this parameter at all. I have noticed this also with a few other newer LTIs.

Does anyone have a solution for this? As I have tried to explain to Instructure... I do not necessarily want to disable Lucid, I just don't want it to be so prominent until I have had time to play with it myself. 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @mbmacdonald,

You can do this by setting the 'default' parameter for the course_navigation placement to 'disabled'.  For situations where you aren't using an inherited key for the tool config, this is a pretty simple addition to LTI 1.3 JSON.  In the case of inherited keys, like Lucid, things currently get more complicated.  You'd need to make this change using the API.  I do have a python script to assist in a change like this if you'd be up for trying that.  Additionally, if the inherited key is edited in the future, it may undo the manual API change, so you'd need to monitor for that and re-apply the change via API again as needed.

I have been asking Instructure to give admins more control over inherited keys, especially the default setting for course_navigation placements.  Like you, we don't want every external app under the sun to be in the course navigation by default, but we'd like to let faculty enable them if they wish.  Hopefully we see some action on this at some point.

Feel free to DM me here if you're familiar with python and need assistance with my script.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[mbmacdonald]

@chriscas Thank you!!! Can I like this reply more times????? It worked perfectly! I am so impressed with how easy your code was to use.

[chriscas]

Thanks, I'm glad it worked for you (without even having to ask me for any directions).

Most of my code projects are things I developed to aide in my work as a Canvas admin (and also as projects to help me learn Python myself).  There are a few like this one that I put ok GitHub by request of community members here.  I tried to make things as easy to use and error-proof as possible, without spending too much time or making the code super long.  if I ever have "spare time" I may try to document this a little more.  I did figure that most people who would attempt to use it would probably understand most of the prompting and how to make everything happen.

-Chris

[JamieSantillo]

Hi!

We are struggling with a lot of the same concerns. We also ended up needing to disable Lucid because it just appeared in courses, causing confusion among faculty and staff, and a slew of phone calls to our tech support. 

Have you heard any updates on external apps integration, specifically giving us more control over the default apps and navigation? 

Thanks!

[mbmacdonald]

Hi @JamieSantillo - FYI I wanted to let you know that I am still using the python script shared by @chriscas above (I add in a new parameter course_navigation[default]=disabled]. It's become a regular part of my routine when I install a new LTI. And it's super easy to use. As I'm always trying to tell students and faculty: you don't need to know how to write a python script to run one.

[KathyPalm]

Thanks so much for sharing this! Super helpful! 😃

I was able to use the script to add the parameter "course_navigation[default]=disabled" for the Lucid LTI on our root level which did the trick.

[Chris_Hofer]

@mbmacdonald ...

---

@mbmacdonald wrote:

Hi @Chris_Hofer (or anyone else who can offer help). I had a similar question - but this is not the answer I am looking for. If you follow these instructions, then no instructor will be able to add Lucid to their Course Nav menu, even if they want to. It will not be available to them.

What I would like to do is make the Lucid Course Nav link disabled by default in Course Nav. Then the instructor could choose to enable it in their own course settings (Navigation tab).

---

In addition to the helpful information you got from @chriscas, my first thought when I read through your reply was that you were thinking of the External Apps screen vs. the Feature Options screen.  When you are on the Feature Options screen, there are some things that you can turn completely on/off at the account level so that they are/are not availalbe at the course level.  Sometimes, you can turn some of those same Feature Options on/off at the account level and then allow instructors to turn them off/on at the course level.  This might have been what you were thinking of?  For LTIs (External Tools), I've not seen those same kind of config options available.  Depending on the LTI, there is an option for "Placements" where you can turn those LTIs on/off for the entire account, but I've not seen anything in the UI that allows you to allow things at the course level like I described with the Feature Options.

I think @chriscas has given you some good advice, but I thought I'd just chime in here with some additional info...for what it's worth.

[jfountain]

Same here - I need it to be off by default but still available as an option for the course editors to use.  Did you find a way to do this?

[mbmacdonald]

Hi @jfountain. Yes, in case it wasn't clear, I downloaded and ran the python script shared by chriscas above. It's really easy to use if a)have python installed and b) understand how to run a script. It's a really user-friendly script