[Courses] New UI: Add option to group courses in all course list by term

Issue: Right now when an instructor views the all courses list there is very few organizational option making it difficult for them to find the course that they need.

 

Current workaround: Brute force searching though a long list of courses

 

Purposed solution: Add a user option to group courses by term. If this option is selected courses will be grouped into terms in a manner similar to the modulus page (example bellow). These groups would also be collapsible like the modules.

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Why: By allowing more sorting options in the all course list, it will be easier for instructors to find the courses they need, this in turn will make the canvas site easier to navigate.

26 Comments
mcsmith
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Thanks for all your input. To restate the problem, teachers who have a lot of courses in Canvas have a hard time finding the courses that they are looking for? It would be beneficial if there was away to quickly access the courses that are relevant at the time.

kona
Community Coach
Community Coach

Yep, sounds like it sums it up pretty well!

pcraig
Community Novice

For our institution, it's important to be able to easily understand how to access past term courses that they may still wish to reference - the mockup in the initial post is barking up the right tree here.  These are still "relevant", just at different times from current term courses.

kschneider25
Community Champion

I would add that the organization shouldn't be admin defined or term defined.  Our CE terms and academic terms are labeled differently although a student might have a CE and academic course at the same time.    I like the Google label ability so that an instructor or student could group their courses by their method of organization.

But term defined would be a great starting place too.

mcsmith
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Unfortunately, this isn't going to be worked on in the next 6 months. We do not wash away these feature request and revisit them regularly. We very much appreciate your participation and dialogue around these requests!

bettie_wright
Community Novice

This is a great idea.  Personally, I don't see how we can live without it.  My list of courses is already too long and cumbersome.  I should be able to move them to folders at my will.  After all these are simply links to where the course really resides.  I should be able to move that link to somewhere else; I'm not moving the course.

vventor
Community Member

As an Instructional Designer that is in over 500 courses, this would help me tremendously. It may even help my load times as the All Courses screen takes a while to load.

choppingm
Community Participant

Pardon my bluntness but a 10 year-old could program an algorithm to sort the global course list (by date, alphanumerically... by any of the column headers). I do not understand why this would not take more than one afternoon to fix (issue originally raised October 2015, users still having to trawl through course lists manually). Please, please implement a fix for this lack of simple functionality. 

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Please take a look at the Course End Date and Past Enrollments section of the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-03-20).  Adding an end date to courses that you would like move to 'past enrollments' might help with this idea.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Find more information about the feature mentioned in the 2017-03-20 Beat Notes in the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-04-01)