[People] Printable course roster

[seth]

As an instructor, I want a print button on the People tab that will generate a PDF or other printable document containing student names and photos in grid format. It'd be nice if the list could be sorted by groups, too.

transferred from the old Community

Originally posted by: Steve Hallman
Thank you especially for contributions by: Glen Parker, Miles Mancini, Richard Meyer

[buellj]

Agreed. We also came from ANGEL and had Instructional Pro Services build a customization for us and it is a less than ideal solution for a number of reasons.

[dhulsey]

Have you looked at Teacher Tools Release Notes (Android 1.0)​? It has a Guess Who feature that will show you the student's profile picture and show you the name when you click. There is also a hot seat feature for randomly calling on students.

Anyway  @peytoncraighill ​, the gradebook export works for me.

[peytoncraighill]

Unfortunately, this is a week of work that's unlikely to get done within the next six months. We trimmed the estimate in workshop by suggesting that printable rosters would only be available for courses with 100 or fewer students (i.e., removing complexity around pagination), but it's still a sizable effort. Hopefully the workaround (Gradebook export) will suffice for the time being.

Attaching this thread to the story and archiving this idea.

[buellj]

So what happens to these archived ideas - are they undead? How are they revived? Do they come up for a new round of voting in 6 months?

[awilliams]

From How does the voting process work for feature ideas?​

Archived

(Not Currently Planned)

An idea might be marked as 'not planned' and then archived. We will comment and provide clear reasons for why we don't plan to work on the idea. Some idea cannot be developed because of a technical limitation.  Others do not fit with overall product direction or do not warrant the resources they would take to implement, relative to other requests.  Sometimes ideas that we like but cannot address within the next six months will also be marked at Archived.  When that happens we will reconsider the idea during the next round of prioritization and will update the thread on ideas that stay in Archived status or move into development.

[James]

I just published a set of user scripts for Firefox using the Greasemonkey plugin that adds the following functionality to the Course Roster (People) page.

1. You can click at the top of any column to sort the roster by that column.
2. You can generate and download a PDF of the roster with one student per row
3. You can generate a Photo Roster using the student photos.

The functionality is basic, the interface isn't overly polished, but it does support pagination for courses with more than 50 students. Once installed, you don't need to do anything additional, it automatically runs when you visit the People page in a Canvas course.

It isn't intended to be a long-term solution to functionality that could (should?) be built-in, but it does provide a possible work-around until something else is done. Hopefully it will inspire someone to do something better.

Please see Course Roster Enhancements for more information.

[swinter]

Why isn't this still open for voting? This should be a no-brainer - to be able to print a roster. We really need this.

[matthew_coser]

Here is a django app I wrote for this - feel free to adapt and use.

https://github.com/mcoser/canvasPR

[matthew_coser]

Here is a django app I helped write for this - feel free to adapt and use.

https://github.com/mcoser/canvasPR

[tdarrow]

Honestly I don't understand why this idea became an archived request. I understand that it didn't reach the threshold of 100 votes, but so far I saw in the comments that several institutions are actively seeking the result of this proposed solutions (almost 10, provided that the commenters are working at different schools), and two institutions developed their own version of an exportable roster due to the need (shoutout to  @matthew_coser ​ and  @jazemlya ​). I recommend that this feature gets reevaluated.