Canvas Dashboard Customisation

[ThomasDoyle1]

Hi Community, 

I am interested in learning about how we might be able to customise our Dashboard view that students see when they login. Here are some requests from our teachers and managers:

• On the dashboard, completion dates need to visible.
• On the dashboard, to have completed and not completed modules separated.
• The final learning page contains a completion button instead of having to click through to a separate page.
• Alerts of expiring courses go directly from CANVAS to staff and managers.
• Provide a course group overview with workable links to outstanding training.
• When clicking on the Admin Tab, the order of links starts with People and then Courses.

• Individual reports on students including every aspect of training with completion and expiry dates.

• When managers/teachers click on that a staff member, we need to be able to export a report that contains all their training.

• Connection of completion reports to HRIS to allow completion tracking and notifications.

Are any of these wish list items possible? I would love to learn more about this.

Thanks, 

Tom

[Chris_Hofer]

@ThomasDoyle1 ...

Off the bat, I would say that many of your bullet points (especially those that involve the Canvas interface) are generally not possible...as I'm not familiar with anything in the user interface that would let you customize those kinds of things.  And, to be honest, I'm not even sure if there would be any kind of back-end programming that could be done to get the kinds of things you are looking for within Canvas.  That is beyond my scope of knowledge.

I guess my question would be...why are these things being requested?  From what I've gathered, it sounds like you're wanting to change how parts of the interface look within Canvas.  This might be fine, but then it does not match up with the official documentation that is available here in the Canvas Community.  And, I would think that you'd have to monitor the code that was used to modify your Canvas environment any time Canvas makes updates ... just to ensure that your code still works as you had intended.

Just wanted to give my $0.02 here ... for what it's worth.  Hope it helps in some way.

[ThomasDoyle1]

Hi Chris, thanks for the response. Most of the points requested are for easier viewing by students and managers, for example, if a student logs in, there is no clear distinction between courses that have been completed, and those incomplete. 

It surprises me that with a focus on tracking course completion, Canvas does not provide any reporting that shows the completion date of a course as far as I can see? That seems like a moderate oversight in capability, unless I have misunderstood something. 

Thanks for your insights!

[NoahBoswell]

Hi @ThomasDoyle1 !

While @Chris_Hofer is absolutely correct that there is no direct way to add your bullet points to the Dashboard within the main UI, I'm going to move your post over to the Canvas Developers Group! Maybe someone there will have knowledge of an app or something you can install to get what you want, but there's no guarantee.

Best of luck to you!

[Gabriel33]

Are you using Canvas for some type of workplace training? Such as for safety or compliance trainings for staff?

[ThomasDoyle1]

Hi Gabriel, 

Exactly, we (attempt to) track mandatory compliance of staff across various topics. We have found that Canvas does not work particularly well for this as it lacks basic reporting features you would expect in an LMS, and does not have the ability to report on when a learner completed a course, nor have them complete refresher training. 

Tom

[jmurray6]

As others have mentioned - I don't think that customization of the dashboard like this is possible and even if it were with the available custom CSS features - one would really have to monitor it closely after every (monthly at times) deploys to make sure the underlying coding/features that the customizations rely on haven't been changed or remove from the core Canvas coding.  In most cases (at least for us - a college) there is a faculty member monitoring each course (because they're teaching them) and posting final grades, etc - so this kind of automation isn't as needed. And what appears as "active" or not on the dashboard is determined by Term Dates of course offerings.

However, we do have two cases where we do something similar to some of what you are wanting - our New Student Orientation and Title IX courses that must be completed within a student's first semester of enrollment with us. Without completing these, they cannot register for the next term of courses. We track completion through Canvas Data. We do pay the extra addon for Hosted Data Management (where Canvas ports the data to a Amazon Redshift hosting server - I believe - for us) but if an institution/organziation did not want to do this, there is a free Canvas Data 2 CLI tool that can be used to sync the data available in Canvas to a self-hosted database.

From this (either Hosted Data Management or Self-Hosted Database) one can use analytical tools like Power BI or Tableau to build reports/visualizations. I use PowerBI, and for these two courses have built a dashboard to track completion. The way these courses are setup requires students to progress through a series of quizzes at the end of each module and achieve a certain score before moving on to the next module.  Thus, I have written my reports to track their scores on the final quizzes in that course (as they have had to pass all previous quizzes in order to take the last one). So, this report visualizes if they have achieved a passing score on the final quiz or not. If they have, they have successfully completed the course (and we can remove their registration restrictions and conclude their enrollments in the Canvas course), if they have not - then our advising office notifies them that they must try again.

You could also use Canvas Data 2 in this way to build a report that would contain all courses/training completed for each individual, etc.

You could also potentially do some automation with Canvas Credentials - where upon completion (determined by criteria setup in the Canvas course) a "badge" is awarded.  But again that wouldn't be tracking completion on the dashboard - but within the Credentials (soon to be Parchment) system.