Improved flexibility in Catalog listing management and reporting

[Dalma_Schnell]

Theme Overview

Improved customization and flexibility enhanced reporting and analytics, and more granular permissions and controls for course listing and enrollment management

What value could this provide to users?

• Admins have more flexibility in listing management to more easily order, duplicate, and correct listing details and catalogs as well as hide currency values for non-charged courses.
• Admins can restrict Catalog courses after 'days to complete' have expired
• Admins need better communication when there are changes in course enrollment (e.g. drop, reached cap, etc)
• Admins want more reporting flexibility to understand performance based on time period, financial refunds based on enrollment changes, and a way to export listing reports
• Catalog Analytics needs more flexibility in administrative management to add / edit Able to add/edit email addresses
•  Admins want the ability to add metadata to course listings such as the start and end date year,
• Admins want flexibility in managing student enrollments through better tools to manually add, edit, correct, and remove enrollments
• Admins want more granular permissions to manage and restrict enrollments and registrations and their associated metadata on a subcatalog level
• Admins want a simplified user experience for Catalog mobile that reduces redundant and time-consuming tasks
• Admins want enhanced automation to update listing titles and paths based on changes to Canvas course names and codes, enable automated notifications to users, and auto-enroll participants into programs.
• Automated notifications to inform end users and admins of changes to listings and enrollments
• Admins want more waitlist flexibility in order set a custom time frame for waitlisted learners to claim an open spot and to be able to accept waitlist spots and continue to payment
• Admins want better synchronization between Canvas and Catalog to keep enrollment data up to data as well as send automated notifications of changes

Why was this theme chosen to open for voting?

October 2023 • Catalog plays an important role when it comes to managing course listings and enrollments. We’d like to equip Catalog admins with robust tools that provide not only more flexibility but also better support course listing management.

Why was this theme chosen for prioritization?

January 2024 • The selection of this theme was based on its strong alignment with Catalog's vision and strategic objectives for 2024. We intend to enhance the enrollment process and streamline administrative tasks, aiming to significantly improve user experience and operational efficiency.

Why was this theme chosen to open for voting?

April 2023 • Catalog plays an important role when it comes to managing course listings and enrollments. By identifying opportunities to support additional flexibility, we can provide admins with more robust tools to both understand enrollment performance and better support the course listing management lifecycle.

Why was this theme not chosen for prioritization?

June 2023 • While we are investing in improving flexibility in Catalog listing management and reporting via efforts such as our storefront customization (in the roadmap), we will not be able to address the outcome of this theme in its entirety and plan to break down this theme into smaller themes per the feedback we’ve heard. 

[ProductPanda]

Note from Instructure

April 2023 • This theme was chosen to Open for Voting. 

How do Ideas and Themes work in the Instructure Community? 

How do I participate with themes? 

[hechla]

I have a concern that this Catalog theme is probably "competing" against regular Canvas themes and there's far more users of Canvas than Catalog so there's no way this will get enough votes to be prioritized. I hope Instructure keeps that in consideration. I hope there's a team working only on Catalog items. 

[JamesSekcienski]

@hechla They stated previously that votes alone don't determine which themes will be prioritized.  I'm not sure how all the other factors they consider will weigh in, but I have a similar concern for themes that are primarily targeted to admins vs themes that are primarily targeted to teachers.

[jsowalsk]

Please make this theme a priority. As you can tell by my feature requests that there is work to be done to enhance the Catalog product. We would like to see it accomplished.

[hechla]

@jsowalsk We're just implementing Catalog and there's a whole lot of work to be done. To be honest, if I knew about all of the flaws I would have chosen another platform. I don't even think it would be a lot of work to fix some of the issues it has. I only submitted one idea because I saw that it was immediately rolled into this theme but I probably should keep a list of things and submit them all because they're just flaws, not just ideas to make things better, but rather things Catalog should already be doing to make it a usable platform. 

[Charles_Barbour]

@hechla In case you weren't aware, there is a Canvas EDU Slack workspace which has a channel for Catalog questions and discussion. Link to join is here: https://forms.gle/rVMmxLzvjH4K2ytC9

[hechla]

@Charles_Barbour Thanks. I just filled out the form. I wish I knew about that Slack... we've been using Canvas for over 4 years and just now implementing Catalog for non-credit courses. I've had a lot of questions over the years... and maybe some good tips to contribute as well. 

[jsowalsk]

@hechla Also, you can post here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Catalog-Discussion/bd-p/catalog_discussion questions and there is a Catalog Users Group that my institution handles and the agenda and contact information is there. 

[KathyPalm]

Management of Catalog listings today feels quite limited. There is no good way to bulk create/edit/manage listings which you can do with courses inside Canvas, which is something our institution would really like.

Inside Catalog all admins have the same access which in turn makes it harder for our institution to delegate responsibilities of catalog. Having some granularity of permissions for admins in catalog would be ideal as well.

Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this theme!

[rmartini]

I echo many of the comments here. Many of the ideas listed under this theme are really important for us and would go a long way to improve our experience with using Catalog. A lot can be done to help admins and subcatalog admins manage and update listings more efficiently. The biggest things that stand out for us currently are limitations on the reports and analytics dashboard, particularly with revenue. Our programs intend to make a lot of use of bulk purchase but interpreting the analytics and downloaded CSV still requires quite a bit of manual labor to figure out/match the bulk purchase and subsequent registrations. We are looking forward to the May 2 update for Catalog Analytics and hope this improves some things. However, we'll still have trouble accurately interpreting revenue because we can only see positive transactions (and don't see drops that have been refunded). We are not yet at the point where we have a lot of courses that need to be managed, but anything to help us improve listing management will definitely be important for us!

[ProductPanda]

  Comments from Instructure

June 2023 • This theme was not chosen for prioritization.

While we are investing in improving flexibility in Catalog listing management and reporting via efforts such as our storefront customization (in the roadmap), we will not be able to address the outcome of this theme in its entirety and plan to break down this theme into smaller themes per the feedback we’ve heard. 

[ProductPanda]

October 16 - November 15, 2023

To participate, please review:

• How do Ideas and Themes work in the Instructure Community? 
• How do I comment on ideas and themes? 
• How do I participate with themes? 

[EllaEpshteyn1]

Being able to duplicate a listing is a must for us. Too much time is spent on recreating listing pages from scratch. 

[jsowalsk]

I second @EllaEpshteyn1 comment. We have been asking for:

• The ability to copy/duplicate listings
• Automatically Enroll Students in Programs much like Listings
• Masquerade as students much like in Canvas instead of hacking the platform with the catalog URL: https://abc.catalog.instructure.com/dashboard/
• Any types of notifications about enrollments (dropped or enrolled), listings and programs (being created or deleted), and utilizing/creating promotions
• Showing refunds in the analytics
• Allowing for multiple offerings of the same course and utilizing sections successfully
• -- Already on the list - thank you!
  • Admins want enhanced automation to update listing titles and paths based on changes to Canvas course names and codes, enable automated notifications to users, and auto-enroll participants into programs.
  • Automated notifications to inform end users and admins of changes to listings and enrollments - see more IMPACT above
  • Admins want better synchronization between Canvas and Catalog to keep enrollment data up to data as well as send automated notifications of changes

If this theme gets selected can the other bulleted items be looked at?

[jsowalsk]

What I forgot to mention, is the we are UMD and the Catalog Users/Peers Group.

[SummerSAMcLain]

Please, please, please prioritize this outside of the other Canvas-related themes! Catalog is a separate product and should be treated as such!

[SummerSAMcLain]

My asks:

• Need to be able to archive Catalog listings without losing data, they need to ‘go’ somewhere outside the list of active listings 
• Need to be able to set up automatic archival after a certain amount of time of inactivity  
• Better, easier way to build accessible certificates. As of right now most elements of Catalog certificates are not accessible. I currently design a blank certificate in PPT, export it as a png file, upload the file to my personal site, and enter the file location into custom HTML/CSS to allow at least the participant’s name and the completion date to generate with the certificate. So those two items are the only recognizable text. I need Catalog, at minimum, to provide a space to store the background image within the system and make it easier to add important information in a readable format. 
• Need more options for Days to Complete function. I want to be able to set Catalog to remove student from the course after X number of days rather than just being available in "read only" view. This is needed so that students to not have unlimited access to paid content which they could then allow someone else to use for free. 
• Ability to search/filter promo codes 
• Ability to generate multiple single use promo codes at a time 
• Ability to apply the same promo code to multiple courses, but not all courses
• Ability to create multiple Catalog listings for a single course to allow for self-enrollment into different sections (section for 'regular' users and 'special group' users, with a different section teacher)

[dave-long]

For a process question: was this Theme not chosen during the last round because it was going to be broken down into smaller chunks?  What in this Theme changed from the April 2023 voting round to the October 2023 voting round?   

Looking at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Themes/Improved-flexibility-in-Catalog-listing-management-... from the April 2023 voting round, it says: 

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Why was this theme not chosen for prioritization?

June 2023 • While we are investing in improving flexibility in Catalog listing management and reporting via efforts such as our storefront customization (in the roadmap), we will not be able to address the outcome of this theme in its entirety and plan to break down this theme into smaller themes per the feedback we’ve heard. 

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I'm all for substantial improvements to Catalog, and echo points listed by others in this thread.  But, if this Theme was just re-opened for voting, how do we know that it has a chance this time, or will it be shelved again to be broken down into smaller themes in the next round?

To attempt to answer my own question above about what has changed, checking https://web.archive.org/web/20230420202810/https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Themes/idb-p/ca... from April 20 2023 and comparing it against this Theme as it is written today (October 19 2023), these items look like they were in the April 2023 version of this Theme, but are not listed here today:

• Admins want flexibility in supporting promotional codes to support multiple listings and gifts as well as notifications when new promotions are created.
• Admins want more permissions to initiate the process of creating multiple subcatalog payment gateways
• Admins want flexibility in Certificate of Completion development including the ability to use RCE, design multiple Certificates of Completion at a sub-catalog or catalog level at the root level as well as restrict editing.
• Admins want additional customization tools to manage catalog headers, colors, and fonts

Excluding the points above is fine, and fits in the response of breaking down this idea theme into smaller parts.  But, there is still a lot in the list above (which is great, cause there's a lot of improvements that are still needed for Catalog!).

So, two pieces of feedback for Instructure here:

1. If a Theme is open for voting in a past round, but does not advance, then is open for voting again the current round, and it changes some in the current round, it would be helpful to be clear about what has changed in the Theme between the past round and current round.  Digging through the wayback machine is kind of a slog, it shouldn't be this hard.

2. It would be helpful to group related ideas/points together in a meaningful / accomplish-able way, so that we know what we are voting on can actually be done.  The scope is more narrow for this Theme than it was last time, which is a reasonable change to make, but it still sounds like a lot.  I'd hate to get my hopes up for this Theme just to get a "sorry, too many things to do in this theme, we'll  plan to break down this theme into smaller themes" type response a second time.

[jlmoss]

I'd also like to chime in with our support for these theme improvements for the Canvas Catalog interface in addition to the additional ideas mentioned in the comments above. We are particularly excited about the improved enrollment communications and administrative management updates.  

I also wanted to triple echo the need to prioritize updates to Catalog separately from Canvas because it is its own product and needs more dedicated focus to make it more useful.  

Asks in addition to other ideas:

• Better tools for managing visual and functional customizations beyond Javascript and CSS. 
• More granularity in permissions so that instructors (in addition to admins) can view analytics and certificates for a course. 

Thanks!

[Charles_Barbour]

Amen @dave-long !

[AshlyPadgett]

Glad to see these Catalog improvements are being considered – I really hope this work can be prioritized!!

[danielcktan]

Out-of-box, Catalog does not have a course menu built into the site navigation structure. (See Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/)

As a result, we have to fall back to using JQuery injects to have clickable category links so that our users can see the list of courses under each category. (See our Catalog Site: https://www.learnforlife.sg/)

These clickable links are actually search query links that we manually created using JQery Injects.

It would be wonderful if a course menu could be incorporated into the secondary site navigation.

[KataKeri]

@Dave_Long 

Thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

The theme was indeed modified and some of the items/referenced ideas were removed and was added to new Themes e.g. I've created a new theme for Payment related improvements (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Themes/Catalog-Payment-Related-Improvements/idi-p/583099#M...) and moved ideas there. This is one example, but I've created some more new ones.

Next time I will pay attention to update the original theme in a way so the changes are visible, and it doesn't have the feeling that we just posted the same idea as last time. 
So, to be sure, it was broken down into some smaller themes, but not I know it is not visible much - I apologise for that. This idea is still have many items, but we're aiming to look at all of the items if this theme gets voted and prioritised, so you don't have to worry about that. 

Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for the suggestions!

Kata

[dave-long]

Thank you @KataKeri !   Glad to hear you are planning on looking at all of the items in this theme if it gets prioritized.