[Courses] Make the course list sortable

[jmc6]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas LMS

---

When you click on Courses and then All Course, Canvas lists them in some random order. As my number of courses builds up over the semesters, with many courses of the same name, I would like to be able to SORT my list of courses by Name, Semester, Recently used, etc.

So... please let us sort these courses so that we can easily find what we are looking for!

[cdraney]

@TedRidgway Sadly, this forum is where ideas for improving the basic functionality of Canvas come to die. If anyone from Instructure is paying any attention to this thread (or any of the others I personally care about), they sure aren't saying anything about it. They insist that we post the idea somewhere else in the mass of labyrinthine "community" sites, and that we recruit votes and PROVE that enough people want this feature. The numbers and intensity of the responses in this thread are, apparently, meaningless. 

I really do like Canvas for almost everything else, but in many ways Instructure is already too massive and corporate to care about a few dozen (or hundred, or (dare I say) mere thousand) users. We are well beyond the days when creating a trial account solicited a personal email from a real person who took real action on ideas and in helping a user get started. Sadly, it appears that that ship has sailed... no doubt right to the Bahamas or some other tax haven of choice. 

I know I'm not helping our case by venting here. If someone from Instructure stumbles upon this, I will likely be dismissed as a crank. And yet I WANT Canvas to be the LMS of choice. I just don't understand how a feature request as basic as this can languish for six+ years. 

</rant>

[Ron_Bowman]

@dpmclaug @bbeck6 @chand2be @TedRidgway @cdraney 

I completely agree that this feature should be built into Canvas.  However, it does not appear that it will be occurring anytime soon.

However, if you are not adverse to using chrome (possibly firefox) and having an extension installed that allows you to run specific java scripts, there is a great program that does the sorting everyone is asking for.

Looking at page 4 of the comments, I have a post near the bottom of the page and James (the author of the script) has a post near the top of the page.  You can sort your list of courses however you want.

As stated at the top - not the ideal solution, but it is one that works quite well.

[ashley_hardesty]

I would like to request that the /courses page allow the user to sort by any of the columns.  Many users would prefer to group all of their SPRING 2022 courses, for example, so that they may be added to the Dashboard, without having to scroll thru the list of courses.

[pan]

Great idea

[daase]

I'd love to be able to sort my Course list by term. It would be a lot easier to find past courses that way.

[jg06]

Could there please be a way to sort courses on the "All Courses" page? I know you can change which courses appear in the dashboard, and to change courses from current to past enrollments, but some "courses" don't fall into either category - they are only accessed annually or you might only need to refer to them on occasion. And the current active courses are buried within them. There doesn't seem to be a way to sort by course title, term, or enrollment (student versus instructor versus view only, etc) which can make it hard to locate certain materials.

[kay_shenoy]

You would think that is the most basic thing that should be doable in a list like this! I often need to look up a student from a past course, or an assignment from a past course. I would love to be able to sort by semester. Instead, I have to scroll down the list to find it. I really need this list to be sortable. 

[Ron_Bowman]

@kay_shenoy 

Look for my post on page 5 of this list and also on page 4.  You did not mention anything like "I don't want to use a third party script", so maybe you did not see the posts related to a way this sorting can be performed.

James on page 4 of the posts is the author of the script, and I have a post down near the bottom that has the actual links.

I have been using several of his scripts and have not had any ill effects from using them - just keep in mind these scripts do nothing with the data in your Canvas course - they just affect the way the canvas pages are viewed in the web browser.  I have a couple of favorite scripts, but the most useful one is quizwiz for  Classic Quizzes (doesn't work for New Quizzes) - so I am glad that Classic Quizzes will be around for a lot longer.

So if you are not adverse to using the scripts, I suggest you look at all of the ones he has written.

[kay_shenoy]

@Ron_Bowman 

THANK YOU!!! I have never used scripts before, but am always open to trying new things. It worked amazingly, even though i had no idea what I was doing!

But it is so silly that we have to resort to third party scripts to do something as basic as this. Does Instructure even see these Idea Conversations???

[Ron_Bowman]

@kay_shenoy 

Glad you were able to work with those scripts.  I would definitely suggest that you look at the details of all of James's scripts.  Some are quite useful - and if you install one and don't like it or don't need it, you just uninstall it.

Believe me, Instructure knows about all of the scripts that James has written.  I think it is a double edge sword on the scripts though.  Instructure can say "so someone wrote a script to do something that should really be in Canvas", and then they say "Well since the script exists do we need to actually put that functionality into Canvas?".  I know some of what James has done has been incorporated, but it still amazes me that the course sorting has not been done yet.