Allow account admins to set default course navigation menu

[buddyhall]

It would be great if we could set a default course navigation menu to hide additional tools unless instructors wanted to use them.

With the increasing number of additional Canvas and third-party LTI integrations that add items to the course navigation, it can quickly grow to be daunting and intimidating. It would be great if we could set these items (Roll Call Attendance, SCORM, Lecture Capture and Publisher LTIs, etc.) to be automatically disabled in the navigation, but instructors could go in and enable them if they want to use them.

[MikeBement]

This would be hugely useful. We have purchased an App for use by only our Music teachers - now a thousand other teachers need to be asked to drag it out of view so their students don't use up licenses.

[dremilyt]

The ability to hide Course Navigation buttons from both teacher/student view via Blueprint or another admin. mechanism is sorely missing. This is especially true for standardized programs (like fully online programs) where you may have a set menu of 5 buttons, let's say, and faculty may be asked to not use the other buttons (but rather, use Modules to present all materials/activities in a linear fashion). By default, our poor current teachers are presented with 26 (!!!!) non-alphabetized buttons including Home and Settings. And, even if we want to, we can only remove 10 of those buttons, leaving us with 16 mandatory buttons for faculty, even if they only use Syllabus, Modules, and Grades (for example). A key reason we left Blackboard was button clutter. Really hoping we can get some traction on this.

[donna_lummis]

Allowing admins to set a default course navigation would be hugely helpful. Like someone else who commented here, we though blueprint courses would be the answer but they aren't granular enough. We don't want the template to override the course start/end dates entered through our SIS import, but there seems no way around this. What we really want is to standardize our newly created courses so the home page is set to Syllabus and simplifies the navigation. If Admins could set some of these course defaults, that would be immensely helpful. 

[chrish]

This would be extremely helpful for out teachers and students. By having the ability to set them at a default would eliminate the need to try and train all the teachers how to do it manually.

[SharonTSS]

Totally agree. Both institutions I have worked for ask teachers to hide all but a few navigation options. This is particular important for younger learners, as the index links can create mass confusion for them in a year-long course.

[TiffanyStull]

I've seen a few posts discussing tools that administrators want to make available to teachers to use in Course Navigation, but not have those tools visible by default.  For example, if your school encourages the use of Modules, you may wish to hide tools like Assignments from students by default.  Meanwhile, some schools may wish to make LTI integrations available for teachers to add to the Course Navigation, but not have those tools appear by default.  If a tool is visible, it's unlikely that teachers will hide it, and thus make the course less accessible to students and observers as well as making the Course Navigation menu less accessible to teachers (in the case of LTI tools) because they will have unneeded items to tab or scroll through.

A couple additional details:

• I am aware that course templates can control tool visibility to some degree, but if you add a new LTI tool at the system level that you want to make available in Course Navigation, it appears as visible in the nav bar for all courses immediately, including courses that were created prior to the addition of the tool.
• While developers can hide LTI tools from the course nav bar by default via the use of APIs, it's not as easy to hide the built-in Canvas tools such as Studio by default.

There should be a way for individual institutions to set which tools are visible and hidden in the Course Navigation by default.  I think this could be done easily by adding a tab in the account Admin area for Course Nav Defaults, and a table similar to what is shown in the Apps tab for all Canvas tools that appear in Course Navigation, with a column to toggle the default display of Visible/Hidden.  In the back-end, the toggle would be setting "default disabled" to true or false as desired.

Below is an extremely crude mock-up of how a Course Nav Defaults page could look, with screenshots taken and slightly edited from the Apps area.

[TiffanyStull]

@KristinL thanks for merging my post here.  However, it doesn't look like I can vote on/star this or other older idea threads that were created several years ago and have not been addressed - after selecting the stars, it looks like it allowed me to vote, but when I return to the page, I find that the number of votes did not increase by 1 (as occurs with more recent postings).

Can it please be reopened to allow for voting?  Thanks again!

[KristinL]

Hi @TiffanyStull - From the information that the Community Team can see, you were the 36th person to rate the Idea. We are able to confirm that your rating counted. 🙂

[TiffanyStull]

Excellent, thanks!  It's weird that the numbers didn't seem to be changing when I clicked the stars.

[mkollman]

This is a idea that I totally support and is something that is missing from the suite of options that Instructure could add for institutional management.  So much of the work has been put into course/instructor controls but lacking for system-wide settings.  Please add the option to set a default navigation option to the Admin controls.  Thanks!!!

[LeifNelson]

Posted in 2015 and lots of support for this one. C'mon Instructure! Make it happen.

[chriscas]

I'm fairly sure that the Course Template feature released last year can accomplish this, among many other things.  Setup the course navigation menu in the template course as desired, set that course as the template for an account/subaccount and then any new courses created under that account/subaccount should inherit the course menu by default.

-Chris

[TiffanyStull]

@chriscas The course template feature allows you to set the default list of current tools and their visibility in courses created from the template in the future.

However, if you add a new LTI tool to the system at the account level and enable its placement in the course navigation, it immediately appears in the course navigation for all existing courses.  You can only hide it by default via APIs.

[chriscas]

Ho @TiffanyStull,

For LTIs, depending how you install them, they can be configured to be disabled in courses by default when installed (but as you noted it can also be done after the face via API as well).  You can definitely do this for the "paste xml" for LTI 1.1 or the "paste JSON" for LTI 1.3.  Many providers don't tell customers it's an option because they want to increase usage/sales of their product, but it's an option that works.  If you'd like more info on this, let me know and I can try to get some screenshots of what you'd need to add to the XML/JSON to make that happen. 

-Chris

[mkollman]

Chris, Good point on changing the visibility of LTIs and it does solve some problems.  I think your resources would be very beneficial to the group and appreciate you willing to share.

How do you or anyone else deal with courses getting copied over a new course shell that has had a course template applied initially or the LTI navigation originally hidden?  In my experience the "copy" reformats everything to the old style and it takes manual changes to "upgrade" the look.

It would be nice if it was easier to set an "institutional default" template or update to a navigational standard without losing course content.  I know this would be tricky in a number of scenarios.  Done ranting.  😉

[chriscas]

Hi All,

To make a new LTI course navigation item be disabled by default, you'll want to set the "default" property to "disabled".  Examples snippets of XML/JSON below:

LTI 1.1 XML (add the "<lticm:property name="default">disabled</lticm:property>" line to the course_navigation area)

<lticm:options name="course_navigation">
<lticm:property name="default">disabled</lticm:property>
<lticm:property name="url">https://example.com</lticm:property>
<lticm:property name="text">Navigation Item</lticm:property>
<lticm:property name="enabled">true</lticm:property>
</lticm:options>

LTI 1.3 JSON (add "default": "disabled", to the course_navigation placement area)

{
"text": "Navigation Item",
"default": "disabled",
"enabled": "true",
"placement": "course_navigation",
"message_type": "LtiResourceLinkRequest",
"target_link_uri": "https://example.com"
},

Hope this helps out a bit, as it should work with pretty much any vendor provided configs.

-Chris

[TiffanyStull]

Thanks @chriscas !

[ProductPanda]

Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.

[AtSea]

Problem statement:

When designing a visually appealing custom Home/Front page - we are providing links to all necessary areas of the course. Therefore, the Course Navigation menu is redundant and takes up too much screen realestate to just say "home" and that is all.

Proposed solution:

Would like for the admin/course designers to be able to set a course (inside Course Settings) to have the menu default to collapsed. Learners can still use the hamburger to open/close if they want to, but start with it closed as it's not needed.

User role(s):

admin,designer