Organizing your Canvas Dashboard

evanp
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Canvas Dashboard

The Dashboard is the very first screen when we come arrive into Canvas after successful authentication.  At the University of Minnesota it goes to “Card View” by default, which represents your courses as “cards” but I tend to call them tiles. The cards  may have images, or they may simply be a color.  

image of Canvas Dashboard

Anatomy of a course card

image indicating the parts of a dashboard card

If you do nothing to your cards

If you don’t customize the Dashboard at all, Canvas decides what is on there, and in what order.  Usually it does not do a great job of guessing what courses you want to be in the cards, so it’s best to dictate that yourself.

Customize the Dashboard “Card View”

Customizing the “Card View”  is easy, but not obvious.

The first thing you should know it that if you add even 1 course manually to the Dashboard, the default automatic  list will disappear. So, once you start customizing you control it all. 

Adding & Removing a course from the Dashboard

Use to change the courses button image to change the cards in the dashboard button.

  • First, click on “Courses”, then “All Courses”
  • Then click on the star next to each course you want on your Dashboard.  
    • Click a unselected star image to become at selected star imageto add a course to the dashboard button
    • Click a selected star image to become a unselected star image to remove a course from the dashboard button

Once you understand this is the way it works, and you are able to remember this again next semester, you are in business.  You can change your Dashboard quickly to match your semester.

Remove a course from the Dashboard “using” the Dashboard

You can click on your course card menu, click “move” then select “unfavorite”

card using unselect

Next, Rearrange your course “cards”

Drag and Drop your cards into your order of preference. 

Summary

Customizing the “Card View”  is easy, but not obvious. Once you understand how it works, you’ll be able to make your daily interactions with Canvas easier, more feng shui (digitally speaking). 

Related to this:

How do I add an image to my course card in the Dashboard?