What are the Dashboard Visibility Criteria

[dacarter]

Our Canvas instance has several "Sandbox" courses for instructors to use to try out new things. Often those courses' End Dates pass and I am asked to extend them because they have dropped off of the instructor's Dashboard. Sometimes, after I (an Admin) extend the End Date, the course is still not visible to the instructor. Usually, it does show up in "All Courses", and they can Favorite the "missing" course.  This seems to happen when a course is technically outside of its assigned Term's Start-End Dates, but the course has Course-specific Start-End dates.  I suspect the assigned Term's time frame is what is doing this, but I am left having to guess at the reason.

My question is - what are the criteria used to determine visibility in the Dashboard? This is more a question of "I'd really like to understand what is going on" rather than a problem.

Thank you for reading/listening!

David Carter

[greydon · Accepted solution]

Hello @dacarter 

Thank you for contacting the Canvas Community. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with courses on the dashboard. Generally there's a few things that will determine if a course is automatically set  or going to stay on someone's dashboard. Namely, the course dates within settings - if the end date has passed then it will default to past courses. Similarly with start dates and future enrollments.  You can remove the dates altogether  especially for sandboxes. Terms- have the term dates and visibility been set so teachers or students can't view them after  a certain date? SIS settings could also play a role but not as much here usually.

The best way to keep a course (sandbox especially) on a teacher's dashboard is  to  remove dates on it, keep it in a default  term, and highlight the star in all courses:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-view-my-favorite-courses-in-the-Card-Vi...

Hopefully this helps! 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @dacarter ...

I completely agree with @greydon on this!  In my former position as a Canvas admin at a Technical College in Wisconsin, we gave each of our instructors a sandbox course that they could use however they wanted.  Similar to what @greydon suggested, you could keep all those sandbox courses in a "Sandbox" term (or whatever name you wanted to use).  And, you wouldn't need to set any dates on that term...nor would you need to set any start/end dates on the course "Settings" page of each course.  Just leave those off, and you won't have to worry about things down the road.  Hope this insight will help you!