Adding a 'Course Code' column to the 'All Courses' view

[rodney_bowder]

Hi

Does anyone know if it is possible to add visibility to the teachers list view of 'All Courses'.

Some of our teachers have many courses with course titles that are very similar and it would help if the course code or the SIS ID was added as a column to help them distinguish which course is which.

Many thanks if anyone can tell me whether this is possible or not. Rod

[chofer · Accepted solution]

Hello there, @rodney_bowder ...

Here is what we do at our Technical College...  All of our Canvas course shells come over from our Banner SIS (Student Information System).  One of our IT guys who does the programming for our Banner to Canvas integration has it set up so that in the "Settings" screen of a Canvas course:

• The "Name" field is populated with the course title and last five digits of a course number.  Example: Basics of Tent Camping (12345)
• The "Course Code" field is only includes the last five digits of the course number: 12345
• The "SIS ID" field contains a longer string of characters which identify the full course number, school year, and semester.  Example: CCRS123-456-12345.202120

All this is to say that when an instructor views his/her course list in the "All Courses" screen of Canvas, he/she will see something like Basics of Tent Camping (12345) for a given row along with the semester/term that the course is located in...which, for us, is usually enough information for them to have.  If the instructor had another section of that course, it might show up under the first section as Basics of Tent Camping (12346).

We do have some instructors who give their courses "Nicknames" (as we do not allow instructors to change the names of their courses via "Settings" on their own).  Do your instructors use the "Nicknames" feature?  If so, that might be a way to help them identify one course from another.  And, the "Nickname" is only a name that the instructor will see...nobody else will see that name.  This is covered about half-way down in this Guide: How do I view my favorite courses in the Card View... - Canvas Community.

I hope this will be of some help to you.  Sing out if you have any other questions about this...thanks!  Stay safe, and be well.

[rodney_bowder]

@chofer Many thanks for your reply. That's a better idea. I'll get the teachers to use 'Nicknames' in the first instance and then I'll discuss with our system architect the best way forward. We've already pondered on whether we could add our specific course id and term code to the course-name.  Our SIS import script could probably take this data from the pull query we have from our Student System (Pro-Solutions) and concatenate it to the course name.

Once again, many thanks, your detailed answer is very much appreciated.