Sorting Assignments Alphabetically

[melody_herzfeld]

A huge amount of time and effort goes into SORTING lessons within assignments especially when intergrating year after year - There should be a way to alphabetize assignments so that they can be  eliminated if duplicated.  If anyone know how let me know - - i see from past messages that it's not an option. It's not intuitive in this respect.

[Ron_Bowman]

@melody_herzfeld -

Unfortunately, I do not know of a way.  furthermore I have not seen any javascript enhancements that do the sorting of assignments.  I believe cidi labs may be able to do what you want, that has to be paid for.

I have a possible work around that may be of some use.  It takes a little work, and requires an Canvas course that you do no care about - or one created just for this procedure.  In any case, import all of the assignments into this "dummy course".  create a module and then go to add assignments in that module in the drop down menu for all the assignments, hit ctrl-a to select all and then add them to the module.  The for the module publish all of the assignments at once with that option that is now available.  go to assignments and select student view and then exit out to create the test student entry.  Then go to the gradebook and select individual view from the drop down on the upper left side.  In that view you can select to view the assignments alphabetically.  go to select a student and select  the test student, then go to the select an assignment option to see all of the assignments.  They are shown alphabetically, so you will be able to tell if there are two of the same name.  Then you will know which ones are duplicated and an be deleted.

I know the above is a lot of work and should not be necessary, but it does provide a way to possibly detect the common names and reduce the work of finding them.  One thing I noticed and I do not know why, but not all of my assignments showed up.  Could just be from the way they were originally imported as not being published.  

That is the best I can do.  Good luck

Ron

[Gabriel33 · Accepted solution]

I have wondered for a while why courses in "Past Enrollments" give me an extra option on how to list assignments, but still no alphabetic order there, just "by date" and "by type" (I only see "by type" in my current courses).

Copying and pasting to Excel doesn't seem like a good solution, as it becomes a mess.

So an alternative, with some coding required, would be to use the API, which returns a JSON with the assignments. If you have up to 100 assignments, adding the following to the end of your base Canvas URL would suffice: /api/v1/courses/COURSE_ID/assignments?per_page=100 (where you replace COURSE_ID with the course ID number).

EDIT
Editing to point out that I found a place to see them in alphabetical order, mostly.
In the Assignments page, click the three dot menu on the top right, and then select to Edit Assignment Dates, as explained in How do I bulk update due dates and availability da... - Instructure Community - 1195
That list of the assignments has 2 advantages:
First, it is easier to copy if you want to just send it to your spreadsheet editor of choice (though if you have multiple assign to dates, it can be trickier).
Second, if you don't have any dates (or if you delete all dates using the bulk delete dates feature in that page and then refresh), then list is in alphabetic order.