Why doesn't Canvas have anything equivalent to Moodle's Course Overview?

[NickRiches]

I work at an institution where, for historical reasons, Canvas exists alongside Moodle. One thing I noticed about Moodle which, in my humble opinion, is better than Canvas is the "Course Overview" menu. This creates a list of all sections and subsections within a pullout on the left (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A65qPYU__xo).

This menu is persistent so you can view it while you are also within a content page.

In Canvas, you can get an overview by going to the modules page

But there are some caveats. Firstly because of the formatting of this page (large font, lots of white space) it is very difficult to get a full overview of the programme. Secondly, it is not persistent so once you enter a content page, the navigation disappears.

In addition, Moodle provides some breadcrumbs like this

There is nothing equivalent in Canvas.

If you want to add some more finegrained navigation features, you can. But it's a lot of work. At my previous institution one of the schools tried to create some unified canvas pages for the school, and ended up having to hard-code breadcrumbs into the top of every page to show students where they were in the hierarchy, and provide links to navigate to the top of the hierarchy. But this is a huge amount of work. I could also create a page to show the structure of the course, and link to relevant modules, but again this is a lot of work.

So I was wondering if the course navigation in Canvas was driven by some kind of design considerations? Canvas guides you through a series of learning activities in a linear fashion. It has some cool features (prerequisites / requirements) which seem to depend on this linear approach to learning. Is the relatively stripped down navigation a consequence of this linear philosophy?

Personally, I would prefer a design with a persistent course overview, and breadcrumbs as they help enormously to contextualise whatever I am looking at.

[NickRiches]

P.S. there is of course a breadcrumb, but it does not show Courses > Modules > Pages > Sub-pages etc which would help to orientate the student within the course. A number of posts have raised this issue, including this one which appeared only a few days ago; https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Canvas-breadcrumbs/m-p/652957

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi @NickRiches ...

I know this might not completely answer your question, but I wanted to share this with you.  I'm not sure if you've heard of DesignPLUS from Cidi Labs or not, but it is a paid add-on (LTI external tool) that integrates with Canvas.  DesignPLUS has many different tools to make your course content pages shine.  One of the tools included in DesignPLUS is an interface that sort-of functions similar to what you've shown in your Moodle screenshots.  The tool is called "Side Navigation", and you can essentially put it on any page you build using DesignPLUS.  Here is the documentation (along with examples) site: Side Navigation: [New] DesignPLUS User Guide.

If you do not have DesignPLUS at your school, you might want to speak with your school's Canvas administrator or someone from your school's Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Education team to see if purchasing might be an option down the road.

I hope this helps...for what it's worth.

[NickRiches]

Thanks. That's really useful, and I will follow this up.

Nick