[Groups] Allow Groups to set Homepage

We have more schools using the admin- and course-level groups feature to communicate with staff in the building and differentiate by type of staff, grade level teams, departments and others.  It would be extremely beneficial if the group function allowed them to set a custom homepage.  If you go to the pages it does allow you to set a homepage but then the group home only shows the recent activity stream.

Added to Theme

84 Comments
hpalmersheim
Community Novice
Status changed to: Open
 
khahn1
Community Participant

I have students in two groups within my class and having the ability to create/set a home page within the groups would be extremely helpful for ensuring the students are working/commenting in the correct group page for the correct projects. Right now the two groups look identical when entering the pages, which can cause confusion among students not realizing they entered the wrong page. Having different home pages would help cue them into the fact that they are in the wrong group page right away. I am pretty confused as to why I can set a front page within a group but can't take that front page and set it for my home page within the group. Can this please be fixed or setup so we can make this work?

BradMoser
Community Contributor

Yup, this seems to be a simple addition that would allow groups to have more a website collaboration space. Let's make it happen. 

barnes_s1
Community Member

I was wondering the same

paolo1
Community Explorer

How do we vote?

BradMoser
Community Contributor

Hi @paolo1  voting actually has transitioned to rating using the above in the post
The higher the rating the higher the importance it is to you. Canvas uses this input along with others to move ideas along the development process. Read more about the development of ideas process

Please rate it up! 

paolo1
Community Explorer

I am sure we had over 500 votes before we transitioned to ratings!

And the fact you can rate is not intuitive. The first time I saw the stars I assumed they were other peoples ratings. Typical Canvas.

BradMoser
Community Contributor

Yeah, I agree....maybe @scottdennis has any insight as to why we moved from Voting to Stars. Obviously, Canvas will get more ideas then they would have time to process and bring to reality. They do need a process for funneling these ideas. So, I just roll with what they chose. 

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hey Brad,

You are correct - the change is partly due to options in the new platform and partially a deliberate attempt on our part to shape how these conversations work.  In the new platform we had the choice of letting people use the star rating system or giving ideas "kudos."  

Feature idea conversations are one huge driver of how we make decisions about where to dedicate development resources but not in the way that many people think about them.  People often suggest very specific ideas - move the button from here to there... People then have conversations where they often contribute use cases, work arounds and additional information that helps product managers learn about how people are using the software.  Sometimes this results in us, well, moving the button.  More often we are looking at patterns and thinking about making more wholesale changes to refactor and major tool - like deciding to tackle the RCE or the Gradebook more holistically.

Here is a little preview of how we can look at ideas on the backend:

Screen Shot 2020-09-30 at 8.26.50 AM.png

You can see that in addition to the comments and ratings we are also paying attention to how many page views by how many unique users, the number of comments, etc

mcnamaras1
Community Novice

Yes, please!