Modules within Modules

[kristi_levy]

As we move toward Personalized Learning we are beginning to feel boxed in by the linear design of Course Modules.  Many teachers would like the Course Modules to look more like the Course listing in the new UI (Tiles rather than lists) AND have the functionality to have Modules within Modules.  This would allow for MANY more options for student Voice, Choice and Pacing options!

Comments from Instructure

Please refer to our comment from the product team. 

[tbrecheisen]

Why would anyone downvote this?  I mean, if they don't like the function, just don't use it.  But to purposely block a useful function for those who are asking for it?  Why?

[scottdennis]

Hey  @tbrecheisen ; Just to answer your question (without commenting on the merits of this particular feature idea); sometimes people down vote ideas because they believe that implementing the idea would cost development time that could be better spent on other projects.  Other times people believe that implementing a given feature would contribute to feature bloat - a constant danger for any platform or app.  Still other times, people feel that changing the software in a particular way would encourage users to exhibit behaviors detrimental to good teaching and learning.

[scottdennis]

I'll also just add that some people see down-voting as rude and boorish and fear that having one's idea down-voted will discourage people from participating.  Others simply see it as a part of a healthy dialogue.

[sibley]

User have agitated for this feature for a long time....I would not hold out much hope as Instructure seems philosophical opposed to idea

jim

[nhazelton]

There are Blackboard, D2L and Moodle, just for starters. It's just a matter of getting the institution to realize they are getting a poor deal for the money and persuading them to shift vendors. Meanwhile, the people who actually build the courses are getting short shrift from our own administrations, as well as being treated as an impediment to renewing the contract by Instructure.

[joel_duffin]

I've mentioned this before, but at risk of tooting our own horn again, Atomic Jolt has implemented this feature (nested modules, a tile view with images for modules, full content search, and embed the navigation view in your home page) as an LTI tool that provides an alternate view layer that sits on top of Canvas modules. Underneath it is still Canvas modules and it synchronizes with Canvas modules. To learn more, see: Atomic Curriculum Tools - Atomic Jolt. We are happy to provide a demo and install it into a course for you to evaluate if you are interested.

[ChrisMedina]

This seems like a good idea. overall maybe having options for different types of module layouts. giving faculty more choices on how the flow of the modules is for their courses. 

[ronmarx]

 @scottdennis ‌, sibley‌, helpdesk‌,  @tbrecheisen ‌,  @nhazelton ‌

I revisit this idea from time to time, and found your comments from August 2018 to be an interesting discourse not only on this idea, but also on the Instructure approach toward Canvas development.

Scott, I admit to once thinking that "down-voting as rude and boorish" and I did think those down-votes on my idea would discourage people from participating. Given the Cold Storage resting place for several of my ideas, I can't say that fear was unfounded.

I don't think feature bloat is anything Canvas needs to be afraid of; it's far away from such a awful fate. It didn't take me long to discover the tedium required in the previous version of Canvas while designing instructional content in 2016. The lack of being able to select multiple items to move, delete, etc. is particularly onerous while working with publisher content. (https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/11477 ). Unfortunately, Instructure has not improved that experience.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the democracy aspect of Canvas Community. I like to think that Canvas #rubrics were upgraded due to Community ideas and resulting discussions. Replicating criteria is what users asked for, and rubrics now are much easier and less tedious to create. Some central features, however, are still needed to make Canvas rubrics look and feel like the real world counterpart upon which they're based. https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12350-simplify-rubrics-look-and-operation .

It's my understanding that Canvas Community the only venue for users to communicate to the Canvas development teams. All of us are doing what we love—providing a digital, virtual environment for teachers and students to proceed through courses to learn new knowledge— and suggest features that will keep our love of using Canvas alive. I wonder how many prospective customers Instructure sales teams have lost because basic design functions are missing from Canvas? Features that relieve or eliminate tedium that still exists when structuring a course in Modules? ( https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5941 and https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/11477?commentID=116735#comment-116735 ). Canvas users/designers want the experience of creating/modifying the structure of a Canvas course to be native to the platform, compared to designing individual pages and assignments usng the RCE/HTML or external tool editor.

Finally, your discussion above also suggested that the ideas that have been around since 2015 and before aren't really on any kind of developmental path as far as the Canvas team is concerned. We want these features to be native to Canvas, not add-ons that bust budgets, and lengthen the learning curve for end users.

Would you remind me of the Community policy on reviving ideas that have been placed into Cold Storage or archived?

[scottdennis]

HiRon,

The policy for reviving a feature idea that didn't garner enough support, relative to other ideas, to keep it out of cold storage, is to submit it anew and see if will fair better.  You can always reference former submissions and even borrow text from the description, etc, although if you do that, please check to make sure the text you are repurposing is still relevant and accurate. 

As far as how users of Canvas can influence the development process and what gets prioritized for development, the most accessible avenue is to participate here in the, as you say, democratic feature voting and commenting process.  Many users also channel feedback via their institution's CSM through whatever process the institution has for collecting feedback.  Some users are 'lucky' and get to participate in events like Khaki and similar exercises held at regional on ground events or at Instructurecon.

As far as feature bloat and on the flip side of the coin, features that become deal breakers for some potential client or another; I don't personally have much insight into what happens in the sales process but I do know that Product has formal channels for getting feedback from them and that we also work with independent researchers who survey wins and losses both.  Speaking only for myself I have been impressed over the past six years that I have worked for Instructure with their success at avoiding feature bloat and confusing UI/UX.

The most interesting (again, speaking for myself only) feature votes are those that attract a high number of both up and down votes.  We try to pay attention to those in addition to the ones with the highest vote counts.  When there is a debated vote, it often signals that something in the product could be better but people don't agree on what the solution should be.

[ronmarx]

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your well-written response, from heart and brain. Much appreciated.

Best wishes for a happy Election Day 2018 next week!

Warm regards,

Ron

[nhazelton]

The only problem with looking at sales and non-sales and the like is that those are largely institutional. This rarely reflects an entity pushing the boundaries, i.e., innovating. Innovation happens on the fringes and is very much a minority thing. Work on what the majorities are doing and ignore the minorities and the edge players and you get stasis. The concepts and the product ossify. The innovators go elsewhere (or give up), and these are not in the non-sales group. 'Majority-think' is disconnected from innovation, so to be innovative requires something more than that.

This doesn't mean ignoring the majority. They need a solid product with varied options, but unless there is a place for radical development and experimentation, we just get more of the same, and the ideas of the developers constrain an education process that has chained itself to the particular product. Buyers have to live with a 'love me, love my dogma' approach by Canvas, or any other product. Can we move beyond that thinking?

[scottdennis]

Hi Bill,

Yep, it is a delicate balance - how much focus to devote to moon shots and edge cases vs how much to focus on stability, uptime, reliability and what the majority of users want.  Another danger is trying to be all things to everyone. If you are interested in more detail into how we do prioritization, I went into it in a little more detail over here.

Cheers,

SD

[ronmarx]

Hi Scott,

I know you (and other Instructurers) understand the breadth, depth, and complexity of improving the Canvas product. The FIRST step, of course, is to recognize the platform's shortcomings and inconsistencies. From that stance, use the shared passion to improve the user experience by addressing the most glaring shortcomings and inconsistencies. If the Canvas development team approached this issue from that perspective, then the solutions you answered, "How does Canvas determine the priorities when selecting new releases?" and "How long does it take for the idea/suggestions to take place (After getting enough likes)?" and "Why are some features not implemented even if they have been requested for a long time and have got a lot of votes?" might be slightly different.

It's important not to let the process of fielding user feedback and suggestions get in the way of timely improvements. All of the ideas I've floated here in Community are from the perspective of a teacher who also happens to be an instructional designer. Most teachers I know use their free time, uncompensated, to create and adopt digital material that improves the learning environment for their students. In that light, these users are the power users of Canvas. Higher ed users who have degrees in programming, software engineering, who have libraries posted on GitHUB are not (IMO) the key users who Instructure should be prioritizing. They can write routines that work inside or alongside Canvas that solve their problems. A few of them have offered those solutions here, in fact.

The 99% of power users, however, do not have the level of expertise to use those solutions. A smaller percentage of power users work for school districts that don't have the budgets to afford implementing those SaaS solutions. The only viable solution we're left with is the ideas that improve power user experience within Canvas should be a part of Canvas itself.

You and everyone who uses the internet, Scott, know that selecting multiple objects displayed in an HTML window is the most rudimentary of functions. Canvas lacks that. The ideas to address this deficiency have been posted since 2015, yet somehow didn't bubble up into the consciousness of the Canvas development team. https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1282 , https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5941 , https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/5279 , and most recently, https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/11477 have all come and gone, and been archived or put into cold storage‌.

It's hard to make these comments without sounding snarky, but I'm trying. Even Microsoft in its Outlook program allows users to select more than one message in order to move or delete, even though it's just the messages visible within the window sub-part. Their select all checkbox appearing at the top of the column works the same way. Consistency.

Another glaring issue with Canvas is the inconsistency within the product itself. There are several of these all deserving of a quick fix, from organizational folders in Pages as they are within Assignments, to draggable rubric criteria following the paradigm in Modules.

By their very nature, Learning Management Systems are turnkey applications. Each part of an LMS should offer at least the same functionality of a competitor's speciality app. A Canvas Rubric should match (and really surpass) what's offered by rubistar.4teachers.org. This is the reason I posted https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12350-simplify-rubrics-look-and-operation . I even created mockups of how much improved a rubric in the Canvas environment would be.

Finally, if Instructure's approach and vision were slightly adjusted, then ideas like https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8263 and https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/12874-text-conversion-to-qti-for-bulk-question-import would be implemented with initial builds or upgrades. Prioritizing this idea, in particular, would put Instructure in a strengthened leadership position in IMS Global because it demonstrates embracing interoperability at its very foundation. If there is space in the next Khaki Development meeting for this perspective, then I'd happy and honored to participate in all earnestness. I hope that perspectives like mine are offered to the Instructure board whose prime directive is to sustain the company and its products. There's always room for improvement regardless of how great we are, that's what makes us, well, US.

Cheers,

i.Ron

[katieplant]

I would love to see modules within modules. I have organized my canvas page with modules for both my classes and for my PLC collaboration page. In both cases, I think it would be an asset to help organize information. For example, within my PLC collaboration canvas site, we have added a module for standard skill practice lessons. As of now, we have just listed all of the assignments, resources, and ideas with a title to go with the standard, but it is difficult to navigate. I think it would be helpful to have a Skills Practice Module and then a module, like folders within a folder, to organize different skill sets. This would also work with different texts that fall under larger units. 

[debra_russell]

What would make my job easier would be if within Links, the Modules tab showed each listed module with a down arrow. When you clicked the down arrow you would then see a list of the different parts of that module. This would provide a simple way to locate part of the module whether an assignment, discussion, quiz - to link to. I would find that very useful.

[sibley]

Hi

I have some instructors in large courses doing an interesting workaround

They make FILES area visible to students and use published/unpublished put folder in student view. Then they have the ability nest folders of content.

[caution rant ahead]

It has been hard to watch how much my instructors in large courses are suffering with Canvas...the instructors with small single section courses - think it is great - but in the large courses (say a 1000 students) the gradebook, speedgrader, groups, scorm is all done so poorly that they have had to stop doing things that were EASILY possible with Blackboard. And in my limited interaction with Instructure, they seem fairly disinterested in providing tools that work for big courses.

For example - The is an unresolved SCORM vulnerability where students can share SCORM object URL's outside Canvas and take each other's tests....

there is lots more....one faculty member even joked maybe it is time to retire.

[rant end]

[sibley]

So we should abandon instructors of large courses...and just make tools that work for small courses

Perhaps some other company should build an LMS for large course if Instructure isn't interested

jim

[ronmarx]

Your idea of pushing the https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/4636-modules-within-modules?sr=inbox&ru=202035  idea to the Content Selection area of the editing mode is interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

Just to be clear, this idea would be the foundation for further development, such as your idea. I hope the following screens and mock-ups explain.

L to R: Current module collapsed and expanded

Proposed "nested module" structure. Nested modules take on a difference color tint to designate they're nested.

  

Where else Instructure decides to publish this hierarchal structure is a related but separate feature.

Hope this helps.

[debra_russell]

Thanks for that information Ron. I'm glad there is a nested structure in the works. With the type of students we have, we don't operate through the Modules display. We remove Modules from the menu and link through a content page within the module so that is why my suggestion would be very useful to us.

[mkollman]

This would be a great addition to Canvas to enhance organization of Modules, so I fully support it, as I have this question from faculty on a regular basis.  I would also vote for the module option to be available in Pages and an advanced version in Assignments, so you could create some additional organization in those areas and then drop them as a "package" into the Modules area.  For those of us looking for more detail and organization, it would be great to have anything.  Vote it up!!!