[Dashboard] Customize the View in Dashboard

[klc137]

As a course design assistant, my dashboard gets entirely too overloaded and the need to scroll to find the course I need to access can go on for a while due to the size of the cards.

I would love to be able to organize my dashboard in a list view and be able to create multiple lists. For example, I help with courses for anthropology, comparative literature and psychology, so let me create groups for those types of courses in 3 columns so that I can see all of my courses in the dashboard quickly and select the one I want to access without the need to scroll.

If I could then also split those columns in half so that I could put anthropology and psychology in one column, comlit and english in the next column and then have room for two more categories it would make my life so much easier!

[jbrady2]

 @klc137 ‌ While this won't provide exactly what you are looking for, the solution that  @James  created (Sorting Dashboard Course Cards) will at least allow you to sort the dashboard cards in a meaningful way for you, while you wait to see if other sorting solutions are created.

[klc137]

Hi Jeff, I appreciate the reminder that course cards can be dragged and dropped into any order we want. Unfortunately, it still doesn't reduce the amount of scrolling I have to do when I am looking for a course in the dashboard. Alternatively, is there a way to make it so that upon logging into Canvas the default view is of my full course list instead of the dashboard? I still have to scroll in there but, at least I have it in list view and can see more courses faster.

[jbrady2]

Kerri, Unfortunately, I don't believe there is, or may ever be an easy and/or universally supported solution to this issue as it does not seem to be one that enough individuals using Canvas have to deal with, or they simply live with it as part of using the product. I submitted a Feature Idea a while back asking for the ability to sort the courses on the Courses list page and add my own "section" titles similar to the current Past Enrollments and Future Enrollments. I am also often enrolled in multiple courses in various roles and wanted to be able to easily find a course based upon the role I held in that course, and this seemed like the easiest way to organize the courses, but it did not gain enough traction among the community to go forward.

[cms_hickss]

Maybe this Idea needs to be in two parts:

1. Let the user pick their default dashboard view:
   • See Courses as a List
   • See Courses as Cards
2. Let users order/group their courses

I will say that columns, if you are talking about tables will/could present accessibility issues --especially with how tables are read by screenreaders.

[klc137]

Susan,  I like the way you think. I honestly though the settings button on the Dashboard the first time I saw it was what would allow me to alter my view from cards to a list. Sadly, I was mistaken. 

I was also not really thinking I wanted the view to be a real table because you are right- those do cause massive accessibility problems. I was thinking more along the lines of proper code with CSS <div> tags that give the user access to alter the layout in the list view to be either two or three columns across and then allow one to toss in Headers above the columns.

Heck, even just the ability to create folders so that I could toss all my ANTH courses into an ANTH folder, etc. . . in a list view so that I could open/ close the folder like you can do with pages and subpages on a website would be awesome. 

Can you tell I like to control the way I organize my computer/ files or what? 😉

[klc137]

I am sorry to hear your idea didn't move forward. It sounds like a good one that I would have up voted! With Canvas being use more among colleges and universities Canvas really should think about the Instructional Designers that are working in creating Master Courses that then need to be duplicated into multiple sections and what the user experience is like for them. Worrying about the end user/ student/ instructor is good form. But, designers need to be thought of as well.

[jbrady2]

Kerri, I like your idea of folders. My mind immediately went how a user can organize apps on a phone or tablet. It would create an extra click, but only for those users who would choose to employ the folder feature for organizing their courses. I know that this would be a feature that I would use. I currently keep my dashboard clutter free by only having the courses there that I know I will probably be working on during the upcoming month, which may not work for everyone depending upon their workload; however, this causes its own issue in that when I get a question from an instructor whose course I am in as an instructional designer but isn't currently listed on the dashboard, then I have to go find the course on the Courses list page, which can be tedious in and of itself.

[fosterl]

I like the various organization ideas here! I am voting this idea up because I agree with you all that something needs to be done.

[jhess1]

We definitely need the ability to organize our Dashboards more effectively!  Here are some thoughts:

1. Could we at least have different "folders" based on our role in the course?  (I.e. one folder for courses where we are instructors, another folder for courses where we are listed as students)

2. Even better would be the ability to create our own folders and choose the name, then place courses into the folders.  (I am thinking of the way GoogleDrive, PCs, and Macs organize multiple files.  Folders are something we are all familiar with.)

[a_coombs]

One other idea for the pot would be to give people some options to choose how to group the cards, e.g. by Term, by Sub-account, by Role, etc. - whilst I appreciate that giving people the power to create their own categorisation would allow all of the above, for many of our students and staff their expectation is that Canvas should be able to do this automatically for them.