Last name, first name as separate cells

[lkiesling]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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I've just used my exported gradebook to determine the grade distribution for a 150-student class. To determine the distribution I sorted the data in order from highest to lowest final score, and then went back to alphabetize the data so I could submit the grades ... only to realize that the student names are (first name last name) in the same cell. This means I have to alphabetize *manually*.

This is terrible database design. Why isn't the last name in as a separate cell to enable automatic alphabetizing? Is there a workaround in the short run? Not that it will help me today as I enter my grades, but ... And the ability in Canvas to search on a student name is a poor substitute for sensible database design.

[marianna_pinter]

In our university system, the first and last names should be separated: in the university shell within the enrollment list the first and last names canbe sorted independently. Just a year ago when we used a different LMS, in that LMS the first and last names were in different columns. When the canvas, our new LMS, course shell is populated, then first and last names are melted into 1 column: sorting by or downloading first and last names independently don't work at our university either.  Recently we got an updated canvas grade book in which the sorting does not work reliably for last names either. . . In our university the canvas instructional designer also have suggested me to post on these canvas community forums: and I did post for several months. I noticed that my issues were posted issues many years ago, still there was no meaningful effort on behalf of canvas to fix. I think that reporting an issue here is not an efficient use of time. At higher level in the university there might still be some negotiation-power after signing the contract; but maybe there isn't, otherwise these issues would have been solved. 

[laszewski]

Furthermore, I agree with you and like to add, why are our university CANVAS maintainers even ask us to fill this out. I have filed the issue with our university experts should they not take care of this and interact with CANVAS ....

I would think this works in an opensource no pay situation. DO I assume my university does not pay for the service and as such why do I have to file the bug and not my University team?

So is anyone from CANVAS listening that can answer our questions, as it appears that our CANVAS teams can not ...

How do we make sure an issue actually gets done ....?

[marianna_pinter]

A university canvas designer mentioned once that canvas was the most expensive option. I think canvas marketing should be pretty great. My understanding is that one of the highlighted canvas feature in the package is this canvas forum: I assume the university canvas support is told to direct us to here (I noticed they use it too). The other is the cloud setup, which omits downtime during updates (it is also bad news when it results in change of live course setting without any notice) . . . I do not see any path for myself to the ears of canvas developers (employed by canvas)

[esmith8]

To get a sortable list for your gradebook, you can go under settings, feature options, and select Gradebook, list students by sortable names. When you download grades into Excel, they will be sortable by last name.

There is so much to love about Canvas- if only I had endless hours to search through features.  I think these programmers should spend ten years in the classroom before they attempt to make our lives easier....

[laszewski]

The feature that is missing is that in our version of canvas the names are formatted in a single column with

Lastname, Firstname

What we however need is two columns

One column is Lastname the other is firstname.

This way when we download we can sort either by last or firstname without any issues. This allows us to easily integrate with other services that use first name lastname and we need to sort by firstname. As canvas can already do the comma why not provide an option so we have two columns ...

[checkma]

I found this discussion by looking for how to sort the names for the Student Analysis report. Evidently you can't, and I posted a rant elsewhere about how (a) Canvas programmers seem to miss asking the obvious question of "Where else would people want to do this?" and (b) the long time it takes to get a feature put in Canvas (12-18 months, minimum).

[Martine_Steyven]

The data we send to Canvas contains 2 separate fields: first name and last name.
However, within Canvas this is displayed as 1 field, more specific in the format "first name last name".

The format "last name first name" would be more convinient, for instance for sorting.

As the fields are passed on separately to Canvas, it might be changed by providing a setting?

[cfellows]

Anyone know where this idea stands?