Drag and drop files into course modules and assignment edit windows

Could you add a "drag and drop" feature to the course modules and to the assignment edit windows? It is already easy to delete a file in the modules (gear feature) and in the assignment edit windows, but adding and editing the file content in the modules and assignment edit windows would be faster and easier for the instructors if they were able to "drag and drop" a file from their computer files into the modules/assignment edit windows.

Thank you,

Doris Brown

San Domenico School

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Ready Release Notes (2020-05-16) 

41 Comments
GideonWilliams
Community Champion

If you like this then please also vote for Peter Nickson's idea -

JACOBSEN_C
Community Contributor

Syllabus too - would be great

sevans
Community Novice

Go Doris! Yes, we all need this feature. If Moodle can do it, Canvas surely can do it. Why not make it easier for teachers to add content? Thank you for taking the time to submit and campaign, Dr. Brown.

unru8306
Community Novice

This is a great idea - it would save a lot of time!

drimmer
Community Contributor

I'm promoting the use of Canvas at my school and this feature would massively improve uptake.

lawrence_rodis
Community Novice

I think you should alo be able to drag files that are in canvas as well as other items like pages, quizzes and assignments.  The ideal way would be to allow multiple windows in canvas however you could still do this if you allowed it between multiple browser instances.

Larry

tsawicki
Community Novice

100% agree this is badly needed!

cward
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

We're investigating the level of engineering effort required to accomplish this. No promises on timeline or whether we'll be able to do it, but know its on our radar!

sringsmuth
Community Participant

I'm investigating the viability of switching our university from Brightspace/D2L to Canvas, and I can't believe there's no drag-and-drop file upload. We've spent the last two years showing our faculty how easy it is for them to upload files to Brightspace just by dragging and dropping, especially if they want to upload multiple files at once, and I'm shuddering at the idea of telling them they need to go back to a dialog box-based workflow for file uploads.

The fact that a user can't even select multiple files at once to upload when putting content into a Module is...well, it's certainly disheartening. It's simple things like this that I thought Canvas would have without question, and it's making me wonder about other aspects of Canvas that might not be up to par either.

RobDitto
Community Champion

sringsmuth‌, Canvas does have drag/drop upload in a course's Files functionality (as well as personal and group Files) in most laptop/desktop web browsers:

I believe this idea is about adding drag-and-drop upload to Modules directly, which currently isn't possible. However, today you can drag/drop multiple files into a Files folder, and then add each of them to a Module.