Remove hidden/disabled menu items from instructor view

[WK90]

A while back, Canvas used to remove disabled menu items from the instructor's view as well as the students. Now they are present but with an eye with a slash through it icon. However, there are links that I never use and more continue to be added to the menu, which has led to the creation of a scroll bar now in the menu (in laptop/desktop view), in spite of only five menu items actually being enabled.

Instructors should have a choice about how many menu items are visible to them as well as to the students.

[Stef_retired]

Thanks for sharing this idea, @WK90 . We've moved it forward for further discussion, but we note that removing disabled course menu items from instructors' view as well as students' has not heretofore been a feature of Canvas. Those menu items have always been visible to instructors, either greyed out or now shown to be via the crossed-out eyeball, so this is not a request for a return to previous functionality.

In addition, the standard navigation links in Canvas are displayed in the View Navigation section of  How do I use course settings?;  additional ones that display in your course navigation have been added by your school administration, so please reach out to them to ask them if they can configure them so that some are not visible in instructors' or students' course navigation menus, and ask them for their reasoning for adding the tools.

[goodbookmom]

I agree with @WK90 on this one. Especially now with the "sticky nav", having all of these extra disabled navigation links is causing that annoying extra scroll bar to take up even more screen real-estate. I don't agree with having our school administration remove them because different types of classes have different needs. For instance, some of the more discussion-oriented courses might use Discussions, Collaborations, and Conferences, but most of our math classes do not, so it would be great if we could choose to remove those from our master courses and eliminate the scroll bar.

Perhaps adding an extra category in the Navigation Settings - enabled for students and instructors, enabled for instructors only, disabled completely. That would allow for all instructors and departments to have exactly what they need and nothing they don't!

[goodbookmom]

I will also add that the current display is confusing. Some links that are disabled still show with the slashed eye icon to show that they are not visible to students, but then the enabled links do not show the slashed eye icon even though they are not visible to students. This makes those enabled instructor-only links look like they are visible to students.

[Chris__Scott]

I wondered if this feature had been given any more thought? It strikes me that if it's good practice to remove unused items form the view of students, then it's also a good idea to remove them from the view of staff, especially when training people for the first time on Canvas.

Presumably the same code that removes the items from view to students could be modified to include teachers.

Perhaps splitting the list into three areas would work:

remove from view entirely | remove for students | visible to all

Obviously, someone who is  a Teacher could change this anyway, but it would make the interface cleaner not to have unused items displayed.

(and if we could remove references to Google docs that seem to appear at random points, then even better!)

[ProductPanda]

Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.