Allow folders in Pages

[hasti]

The Files section of Canvas allows folders for organizing files. Pages does not. Why the awful inconsistency in the user interface? I currently have 30+ pages that I've created in - all in flat directory structure. I'd like to be able to organize them, you know, like Files and stuff I have on my computer.

Comments from Instructure

Please refer to the update from the product team here. 

[bdust]

The irony is, in an effort to make Pages usable, I ended up deleting about 90% of them.

That's rather sad if you think about it. 

A good idea poorly implemented turns a daydream into a nightmare.

[laurakgibbs]

And when I talk about being an LMS minimalist, that is definitely NOT what I mean. Ouch. ...

[bdust]

Laura

I'm the opposite of an "LMS minimalist" (maximalist?) I believe in using the tools available to aid in the class. The reason I deleted 90% of my pages was not to go minimal, but because that was the only way to make the Page feature usable. 

[laurakgibbs]

Exactly; sorry if my comment was too short,  @bdust  ! The idea that you had to delete Pages to make the tool usable is a very sad commentary on the LMS. As a minimalist, I don't have opinions one way or the other about most features, because I don't use them; I don't expect the LMS to meet my needs most of the time (and that's okay; I like using other tools), and I'm usually just surprised and happy if it does meet my needs for something. The idea that this basic feature is not meeting people's needs is very frustrating to hear about, and I hope Instructure will come up with some kind of solution (if not folders, then something that makes it feasible for people to do serious content development inside Canvas with the HTML editor provided).

[GideonWilliams]

laurakgibbs‌ and  @bdust ‌

I fully expect to be able to use pages for all the things I want to do and every LMS I have used previously has allowed me to do this - either embedding web2 tools via iframes, adding links to other websites or displaying media on the page. If we were a Google school with integration then this would be pretty much complete - as a Microsoft user we stll wait for full integration.

I get frustrated when I cannot do this and invariably I will not use a tool if it cannot integrate with the platform. For me, the platform is like a supermarket. This is where I go to do my shopping and once I am there, I have a choice of items to purchase.

The cost of running Canvas is a significant financial commitment from our school. I cannot justify to our leadership team (and it is unlikely I would get approval) for the purchase of a range of other software tools to do jobs that I expect the platform to provide. H5P is one exception to the rule because the new quiz tool does not have a range of features I had hoped it would have.

As a teacher working in K12 our students dont want a list of links to click on. They want interaction and material located on a page with easy navigation. You just have to look at how successful OneNote is and how many teachers are drawn to it and the Class Notebook feature.

Very much liking these discussions btw....

[laurakgibbs]

Agreed about this discussion... it's a focal point for a lot of important topics!
About tools: I hasten to add that I mean free tools, since I like to share the tools I use and encourage students to explore those same tools also since they already have a sense of what the tools can do by seeing how I use them for class.

I do pay for premium upgrades of tools that I rely on most heavily like Inoreader, Diigo, Soundcloud, Padlet... but those all have great free options and that free service level meets my students' needs.

Something my school does pay for and which I will say great things is "Domain of One's Own" from Reclaim Hosting which gives faculty and students real webspace to work in:

Reclaim Hosting – Take Control of your Digital Identity 

I am such a fan of all the work Reclaim Hosting does. 

It's a night-and-day difference having real control over my digital assets through my own web space. I make only very limited use of Canvas Files and Pages, and whenever i do it gives me a headache because I am used to having a real control panel. Where I am, you know, in control! 🙂

[ronmarx]

You just know that I'm going to support your "...if we are going to start creating folders for pages then why not sub modules for modules..." with a resounding AYE!

[ronmarx]

Your comments about the economics of maintaining an LMS in a school district (or campus setting), and H5P to support features all of us thought would be in the baseline, initial release of #quizzes.next‌, inform me that you and I (and others that agree and like your comments,  @GideonWilliams ‌) are on the same page.

Strength in numbers!

i.Ron

[dli1]

Spot on.  Canvas continually disappoints me by assuming it knows better what I need than I do.  It has made independent development of sites painful.  For example I need have our campus administrator give me privileged of access to the entire campus just to edit and create new items in the main menu.  The list goes on. Wouldn't it be nice to haves tabs available on a page without having to peal back the hypertext coding!

[dli1]

Let me elaborate a bit on what I see in the responses.  On the negative voting side I see a number of presumptions about how users wanting this feature are either "using Canvas in inappropriate or inefficient ways".  On the positive voting side I see a wide variety of evidence that users simply want to be able to access tools that make Canvas more adaptable to their needs and preferences.  I put myself in the latter category.  Since my campus moved from Blackboard to Canvas I have experience major limitations in how I am allowed to structure my online course delivery and many automatic features which create communication problems for my students and which I am unable to defeat.  Here are just some of the main ones.

1.  Limited access to redirect so as to tailor my main menu is a persistent problem requiring that I be given temporary administrator privileges and this runs counter to overall campus security. 

2.  All sorts of automatic features in entry, display and organization of the gradebook are constantly problematic since I want only to use the gradebook simply as a means of confidential grade reporting and do not favor organizing my course in terms of categorical fungibility of points between evaluation modalities. The system reports percentages to students even when this is meaningless for letter grades, and this creates much confusion for them.  There is no simple way to simply import a column of grades maintained in a separate much more powerful gradebook on spreadsheet.  (This process used to take less than 1 minute and now takes many times that for what should be a simple act of communication.)  There is no capacity to simply add or delete a grade column other than by creating an assignment and this is not always efficient or appropriate.

3. The inability to easily introduce tabs on a page so that students can access three-dimensionally organized files and items (e.g., chapters by categories by individual items) forces me to go into hypertext coding for what should be a simple structural control process.

4. Since I don't give students direct access to either files or pages, I treat them as simply repositories for delivery which I see as separate from content.  In this regard having folders in pages simply helps me organize my "repository" in an efficient fashion.  Don't suggest modules since after many experiments I find they do not function in the ways that I desire or require.  Simply allowing modules in pages would solve most of the problems I encounter in this regard, but Canvas (unlike Blackboard) does not allow this.

5. For a variety of security, copyright and other reasons, I maintain much of my content outside of Canvas (e.g., on OneDrive) and simply use links inside both pages (the delivery framing content) and assignments (the links to operational activity content).

6. For both professional pedagogical reasons and Campus general education requirements, all student writing is given a written evaluation in addition to content and completion evaluations.  In this regard the rubric system is often frustrating since even a small editorial change in a rubric requires reassignment of a new rubric rather than a simple updating of the old rubric.  For rubrics with multiple deployments there is no capacity for mass updating across all assignments in a course.  Further, there appears no simple way to download rubics as a spreadsheet readable file.

And on and on.  Basically Canvas provides a number of nice features that are superior to some other LMS.  However, it does so at the expense of having severely hobbled users who have sound pedagogical reasons for organizing their work and courses in ways not in alignment with Canvas rigid assumptions and forced access.  My point, and I think the point of many others, is that users know best what they want to do in their teaching and Canvas should support not limit their access to tools and controls within the system.  These discussions are useful when individuals provide mutual support and solutions to each other, but less so when they presume that people with criticisms of the system are in some way in error with how they wish to operate.  Enough said!

[laurakgibbs]

Although all the "wouldn't it be nice"s will never get around the huge price you pay for deploying content inside Canvas: you are only going to get a small portion of the screen to deploy that content, with so much of the screen taken up by sidebar navigation and top-of-the-screen space, along with all the limitations that will invariably apply to content design itself.

It's a trade-off.

I understand that for some people the trade-offs are worth it, but it is always going to make more sense to me to develop the content with tools built for real content development, which can then be integrated with Canvas.

Even then, though, my students are better off looking at the content (Blogger, Google Docs, Padlet, whatever the case may be) by opening the content outside of Canvas where they can use the full screen, can bookmark URLs as they browse through hyperlinked content, etc. I put lots of links in my content, and I want students to follow those links and bookmark them... and that means it's going to happen outside of Canvas, not inside. All the links in my homepage, for example, automatically open outside of Canvas:

India.MythFolklore.net

(open Canvas course with custom URL)

[laurakgibbs]

Thanks for your detailed, specific examples,  @dli1 ‌! I have the same problem with the all-numeric Gradebook. I proposed the addition of a text-field column to the Gradebook and that proposal went nowhere (it's in Cold Storage now); I wrote up my notes about it here:

Feature Request: Text Fields in Gradebook 

About the main menu: our campus allows us to use the Redirect Tool as a way to add new items to the main menu, and we also have the ability to remove unwanted items. I would find it very frustrating not to be able to do that as a faculty member; it sounds like this is a decision your school has made which perhaps you could persuade them to reconsider...? I use the Redirect Tool to customize my menu as you can see here (my classes are open):

Myth.MythFolklore.net ... half of my menu items are there are ones I added using the Redirect Tool

I can understand why ideas that don't get a lot of traction just disappear, but I really thought the outpouring of support for this idea would merit some kind of response from Instructure by now.

[GideonWilliams]

The screen thing is very annoying. Maximising screen acreage would be the first thing on my list. The option to hide the right hand side is sorely needed.

Co-incidentally, something that Microsoft OneNote has thought about and implemented in their latest Windows 10 app in ClassNotebook:

Click on the diagonal double headed arrow to get:

[dli1]

Laura,

Thanks for the response. I will check with my IT colleague about the permissions for editing and deleting redirects from my main menu. We have had to learn Canvas together and he is the one who came up with the initial solution. By default users are locked out of editing or deleting without administrator privileges; we can only create. It has been a slog converting from Blackboard to Canvas for me since I am by far and away the most extensive poweruser on campus and no peers to consult.

I agree with your minimalist strategy although my point of reference might be slightly different. Since I do a good deal of international work as well as my teaching, I have found that my best strategy is to become exercised in broad-capacity readily available software rather than a lot of specialized packages. Therefore, I use OneDrive as my primary content file repository, Excel as my gradebook, Word, Acrobat and PowerPoint as my content file generators. Within PowerPoint I use mix to spin the animated mp4 files and to create specialized images for use in graphics (also photoshop for some picture editing). I realize that there are great additional tools available for many of these tasks, but they are not always available in different situations. Basically, I don’t want to be locked out of capacity and these programs are almost always available and don’t suffer the same parochialism that Mac/Apple necessitates with its software; i.e., they all talk well with other programs and LMSs. I do use a couple of specialized packages for statistics and research methods (SPSS), but even there I emphasize things like Excel for data entry and graphical presentation. Finally I use LMS to focus specifically on “delivery” or context framing of assignments and content. For me content and framing instructions are quite different animals and I don’t want them confused. Further, I design all assignments and activities so that they can be deployed on-line, in-class or in combination. This allows me to dynamically assign the modality in response to the needs I see in a given class at a given time. This dynamic assignemtn capability is central to my view of pedagogical delivery.

My strategy general is not solely due to availability of software in different environments, however. It is also driven by economy. To the degree that I can harness the power of broad-capacity software, I obviate the need for many specialized packages and can use it across a broader range of applications personal and professional. I can also do a much better job of instructing students in how to use these tools in their own work since I make all edits in class transparent. In fact when something shows up incorrect, I immediately do the editing in front of the students while talking them through the process. This has multiple pedagogical benefits often not directly connected to the course content itself. It also demonstrates teaching and learning as a continuous process. If you are familiar with the “hierarchical learning trajectories literature” you might recognize that it has informed my approach, although “minimalist” is a suitable and simpler descriptor!

Having said all that (rather long-winded, I agree), I am including some images from one of my class websites to show a bit of how I use the LMS and why Canvas has some serious impediments. My most basic challenges come from the built in and missing features of the gradebook, the inability to organize my Pages into housekeeping folders for easier review during development, the tragically flawed hypertext editor, the inability to put modules in pages (Blackboard allowed this), and the absence of a simple way to include tabs on a page with complex sub-fragments.

This screenshot shows the modifications I made to the main menu for a Race Relations course. The menu looks different for each of my courses since they have quite different content (e.g., statistics, research methods, race relations, sociology of the family, population and environment, environmental sociology, urban communities, senior thesis, introductory sociology, etc.)

I have selected the Unit 1 page to show one of the matrix designs I use to direct students to the relevant information for that segment of the course. The active links take them to mp4 animated presentations of all visual slides I use in class. Assignments vary in type and number by chapter. Mini-lectures are short presentations (mp4, pdf, data, etc.) on a narrow topic but which fit into the main lecture stream. Often the mini-lectures are skipped in class but allow me to assign viewing out of class. Links are to supplemental information (often URLs) that I have used or referenced in class or that I find relevant.

Here is a sample of an extensive assignments page (I have front-end loaded this course with lots of work that I will process for the class and bring back in a collated form in later lectures.)

It’s fair to say that I have worked around many of the LMS confounds to maintain a content and delivery structure that fits my workflow needs, pedagogical orientation and student needs. I strive for simplicity of access by students, transparency of content, preservation of student organization of their time allocation and fundamentally non-linear yet hierarchical design.

Here is a copy of a Unit page from another course in which I have experimented with using tabs so as to allow isolation of each assignment page to its own page. Again the point here is that access, context framing and activity/assignment are all separate things for me and need to be editable independently.

Here the tabs at the top jump to a series of tables below which appear on the same page. Contrasted to the previous example this allows each of the various assignments to be linked individually from the table with time estimates included, allowing students to make good time management decisions (I consider this a valuable learning objective). This structure also allows each assignment delivery to reside on its own page. The cost of this structure is significant hypertext work and is costly from a development point of view, especially with the primitive hypertext editor in Canvas.

That’s probably way more than you might be interested in, but I really wanted to share this approach with someone that I thought might appreciate what I am trying to do. Besides it’s tough working on the edge with limited scope of vision and few triangulation points. What I can say is that student feedback is overwhelmingly positive, except for the fact that I’m “too hard”! I can live with that as long as they also say “he’s fair”. Thanks again for your input.

David

[awilliams]

Hi  @dli1 . While reading your post this line struck me, "It has been a slog converting from Blackboard to Canvas for me since I am by far and away the most extensive poweruser on campus and no peers to consult." I wish you had more peers locally to work with but it makes me so happy to see you finding peers in the Community that you can work with on your transition. It is harder for power users of any system or working environment to transition to a new environment but with enough peers and assistance from others I believe you will be successful finding ways to use Canvas and your other tools of choice. Thanks for being a part of the Community. Cheers!

[DeletedUser]

In the process of updating a course for the new semester and WHEW do I wish this was implemented already. In adjusting some of the content on a page, I often have to relink a page. Having to SCROLL THROUGH and LOAD MORE pages constantly in the Pages section on the Edit screen to find the ONE I want is so frustrating. Especially when I scroll PAST it, which is so easy to do, so have to go back, or think, oh, it's in THIS section of the Loaded More Items, no wait, it isn't, let me LOAD SOME MORE and Canvas certainly did not think it would be helpful to delineate between sections as you LOAD MORE, so I end up scrolling back up OVER the ones I already scrolled over....

Just think, if Pages were in folders, it would be so much easier to quickly find the ONE page I'm actually looking for. Or heck, if I could select a page from a Module, but oh, the Module tab on the Edit screen only lets you link to the Module header, not drill down into it to pick one particular page so yep, gotta LOAD MORE pages.

Can anyone really blame time-crunched faculty and assistants for implementing the most bare-bone and poorly organized courses when Canvas themselves makes it so annoying to structure and organize content? Since Canvas cannot even find the motivation or resources to make this a priority, even as it reigns as the #1 user-voted request on this forum, I certainly can't begrudge my colleagues who simply cannot be bothered to deal with the hassle.

[laurakgibbs]

I don't know if this will be a workaround that works for you,  @DeletedUser ‌, but I experience similar loading problems with Gradebook (I use microassignments, so my Gradebook is always slow to load), and my workaround is this: I have a spreadsheet which lists all my students (and I can sort by section, other stuff, it's a very handy spreadsheet for me in general), and one of the columns in the spreadsheet is the URL that corresponds to that student's individual grade record in Canvas. One thing I really do like about Canvas is the way that pretty much everything has a simple, easy-to-understand URL, like a student's grade record which is: 

https://canvas.ou.edu/courses/109501/grades/____#tab-assignments 

So, if I were trying to manage content in Pages (I'm not), I would create a spreadsheet which lists my pages by row, along with the Canvas URL. I could also use that spreadsheet for tracking other things like my editorial review process, categories and subcategories, and so on. If you made a spreadsheet like that for your pages, you would have quick access to your URLs which you could copy-and-paste for linking, and the spreadsheet itself might also turn out to have other useful advantages too.

I know it sounds dorky to have a spreadsheet outside Canvas to do the work you need Canvas to do, but that's a solution that works for me with student information management (since the Gradebook is a lousy spreadsheet), and I would probably do the same thing for content management, if I were trying to manage content in Canvas (I do all my content management outside precisely because the content creation and management tools are so poor compared to real content development platforms).

[DeletedUser]

Thanks for the tip laurakgibbs‌! You're right that a spreadsheet key to track links would be really helpful. I am forced to generate my content within Canvas because some of my faculty like having access to edit or add stuff, but I write all of the code externally and not going to Canvas to grab links would be easier.

[laurakgibbs]

Spreadsheets rule my life! 🙂

[kbeachy]

Is this issue dead, as far as Canvas is concerned?

I asked this question as a "new" issue in the community, but of course it is not really new. I keep reading about workarounds, and organization attempts existing outside of the Canvas LMS, but it seems to me that Canvas truly could not care less about what their clients want. When our school was considering moving from Blackboard to Canvas in 2015, their marketing team assured us our concerns about Pages, Rubrics, and the inability to see questions details in quizzes exceeding 25 questions were being fixed and would be implemented within the following couple of months. HA!

Sorry for the soapbox rant. 

Thanks