Course Navigation Default Order

(11)

Giving the option to Admin to set a default order on how the navigation pane looks in a course would be great.  We would love to lock down the default order for every course, and allow instructors to add to that list and re-arrange the items below the default order.  

Our school recommends this order:

  • Home
  • Announcements
  • Modules
  • Assignments
  • Discussions
  • Grades
  • People
  • Office 365

It would be nice to sticky this and add or remove items below.

13 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

 @Jason_Ross ‌, we've opened this idea for voting as a companion to https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4922-allow-admin-to-set-default-course-settings-for-courses (which requests, among other things, admin ability to set the course navigation order, but not the ability to lock it once set).

Thanks.

jwalz
Community Participant

Yes please.  I would like BOTH.   The option to set and lock the default set of navigation items, AND the ability to lock the order of those items.   It is possible that these are two independent toggles.  Mainly, it would be preferable to be able to lock the default set of navigation items so that faculty cannot turn any others on.  

jwalz
Community Participant

How do we vote??

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

@jwalz Ideas are now accompanied by ratings, and you can read more about how it works in the How do I rate a conversation? section of How do idea conversations work in the Canvas Community?

stenochstanly
Community Member

Please make less of the courses menu items default.

My experience of Canvas is that most of the teachers are not aware of the possibility to disable the course menu items, which results in a lot of unnecessary menu items (about 10 out of 15 menu items are usually not used!).

It is quite obvious to me that the option should be for the teachers to ENABLE menu items that they want, and not DISABLE ones that the do not want...

Of course some of the menu items, such as Startpage, Users and maybe Files should be mandatory, but items like Conferences, Collaborations, Discussions and the External tools should be added manually by the teacher.

stenochstanly
Community Member

@Stef_retiredI don't see my idea being included in the original post in this thread by jason_ross? My idea is about LESS default menu items, not necessarily default ordered and locked items.

This thread is also based on that the Admin is doing it's job or being reachable for feedback - none of which is always the case, to say the least...

 

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

@stenochstanly 

Please know that if there is a change to the items included as default in course navigation, it will definitely at minimum involve Canvas admins and more likely be a design change where control rests with the campus admin based on their assessment of the needs of their organization, so your comments here are an important part of the conversation.

stenochstanly
Community Member

@Stef_retired

Is it perhaps already possible for the Admin to reduce the amount of course menu items that are activated by default, so that the teachers doesn't have to DE-activate items (teachers can DE-activate menu items on their course, but almost never do...)?

We always have 16 default course menu items - but only 6 is used... (Imagine if that would be the case in the MAIN menu - add 10 never used items in the MAIN menu and let it be up to each teacher to [never] deactivate the 10 unnecessary items... That should make the magnitude of this UX problem obvious).

I think the idea of minimize the amount of default course menu items deserves its own idea thread, or be included in the main post here.

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

@stenochstanly 

The decision as to which navigation items should be the default needs to rest in the hands of the local Canvas admin so that they can set a default that is based on their particular institution's needs; what might work well as defaults for one school might not be suitable for another. 

stenochstanly
Community Member

There is obviously room for improvement if 60+% of the menu items are useless, over and over again.

Maybe course menu items with pages that are not yet used/edited/filled with any content (and therefore useless to the students) should be invisible to the students until they actually are used (useful for the students).

mclgreenville
Community Explorer

Badly needed!

We added some LTI's this fall and they are surfaced in all Spring 2021 course shells in the navigation area. Bummer.  These LTI's are unique and only used for a small number of courses. We need the functionality to create a default navigation that can then be edited by the instructor of record. 

 

hburgiel
Community Participant
Problem statement:

Individual instructors can, and do, change the order of items in the course navigation menu. This makes it harder for students to find menu items as they move from course to course. For example, the link to Zoom may be at the top of my course navigation menu and at the bottom of a colleague's.

Proposed solution:

WCAG guideline 3.2.3 recommends that "Navigational mechanisms that are repeated on multiple Web pages within a set of Web pages occur in the same relative order each time they are repeated, unless a change is initiated by the user." If we view the student as "the user", our instance of Canvas is not in compliance with this guideline. Furthermore, it's difficult for faculty to maintain compliance even if they want to. In contexts where students are taking only one course, faculty should have the option to rearrange Course Navigation menu items. Given that, I can think of two solutions: 1. Create an account-level option to lock the order of Course Navigation menu items. Faculty would be able to enable or disable, but not re-order, the items. 2. Add a "reset" feature to the Navigation tab in settings, allowing faculty to easily reset their course menu to the default settings for their institution.

User role(s):

admin,instructor,student,designer

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

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