Viewing Multiple Courses in Separate Tabs

[Carter41]

Does anyone have a way to view multiple courses at once? I am the sole admin for 50+ blueprints and 100+ courses (and growing!) in a given term. I constantly need to get into these courses and would love a way to click one button and have all of them open in new tabs vs. manually command-clicking on 15 links per page (as Canvas only lists up to 15 courses at a time). Thanks!

[james_whalley]

I in no way endorse the following product, nor have I tried it, but you could go to your Courses page using Chrome, highlight the courses you want to open, and then use this browser extension.

[Carter41]

I appreciate this great suggestion. Unfortunately I just tried it and there is no way to easily select all of the course links without the "Teacher" and "Sub-Account" links also being selected, and therefore opening in new tabs as well. I will look for another extension that allows you to select just links on one "column" if that makes sense.

[james_whalley]

Where are you seeing the list of courses limited to 15? Also, why do you need all of the courses open at the same time? You can only see one tab in each browser window at a time, right? (Not judging, just trying to understand.)

[Carter41]

I need to go through each course every term and adjust things like module access dates, assignment due dates, and a slew of other tasks. When I filter by term it only displays 15 course links per page (see attached screenshot). I would love a way to have all the courses open at once in separate tabs so I can go through each class rapid fire and make my edits.

[james_whalley]

@Carter41 I am not sure if you have this opportunity, but if you have a chance to learn about the Canvas API, you might be able to use code to automate a lot of this update work and limit your time on redundant tasks.

[Carter41]

I'm not a programmer but hopefully our development team can assist with this down the road. Appreciate the suggestion!

[dbrace]

Hi @Carter41,

I do not know of a way to automate it but you could use bookmarks with your preferred web browser.  You would need to:

1. create a folder for all of them
2. open up each course and put it in the bookmark folder
3. after populating the folder, you can right-click on the folder and select "Open All" (and a couple of options related to it)

It's probably not what you are looking for but it's the best I can offer without using programming methods generally mentioned by @james_whalley.

-Doug

[Carter41]

Appreciate this idea and I thought of it as well. Blueprints would work ok; I would just need to add new ones to the list as we build about 5 new ones per term. Term courses change every two months so I would constantly be deleting the old ones and adding the new ones.

[dbrace]

Something else that came to mind, @Carter41. From the "Terms" list of your Canvas instance, you should be able to:

1. click on the "# Course" link
2. click on the "Show only blueprint courses" checkbox
3. bookmark that specific link (with term and blueprint added to URL)

Does that help?

-Doug

[Carter41]

I do have it set up like that and it's bookmarked in my browser. That URL displays my 50+ blueprints over 4 pages, as it lists only 15 at a time. So if I want to view all 50+ blueprints, I need to command-click the first 15 course links on page 1, then open page 2, command-click on the next 15 course links, etc.

[dbrace]

I see and I apologize for missing those specifics. I thought it might be the best option without having too long of a list.

Just curious. If you plan on having so many tabs open all at once, do you have any performance and usability (e.g. visually seeing so many tabs) concerns?

-Doug

[Carter41]

No worries and I appreciate you trying to help. I work on one course at a time and close the tab when I'm done, and then move onto the next course. So far it hasn't been an issue.

[paul_fynn]

It is possible to set up a dummy course and use an iframe embed to 'window' content from another course.

You can get the courseids from a course storage report, for example, and then build your iframes for individual courses in individual spreadsheet rows linking the specific requirement (eg home page, syllabus, assessments) to the iframe.

You then copy the code into the htmls view for as many links/pages as you like (it gets wobbly at about thirty frames), and the pages will all appear open.

If you want to be clever about it you can use <details><summary> tabs to 'concertina' the iframes open and closed.

Have fun !

[Carter41 · Accepted solution]

Thank you, Paul, and everyone else! A tech developer in my office ended up writing a Python script using the Course Storage report in Canvas for me and now all the tabs for a given term open with the push of a button.