Date Based Button

[mimip1]

Hi all, 

I am trying to find a solution to the following: 

Our courses are organized by weeks (week 1, week 2, etc.). The issue is that students don't know what week it is. I want to create on the home page a button that links to the current week's activities. The button would only appear on a certain date range. For example, only show the Week 3 button from 4/2/24 - 4/30/24. Students will always have the link to the correct week's activities on the home page. The only way I know how to do this is with Javascript, but that isn't an option with Canvas.

Any suggestions on how to achieve this or how to make it easier for students to navigate to the correct week based on the date? I considered putting all the buttons for each week on the home page and putting the date range next to each week, but that is quite a bit of text and makes things look cluttered. 

Thanks in advance!

[paul_fynn · Accepted solution]

We just put all twelve (or 24) week link in the Home Page and let the students figure it out.

This has come up before, and it would be interesting to be able to highlight the current week - of course you could manually 'Bold' each week as it comes up, I guess....

[paul_fynn · Accepted solution]

We just put all twelve (or 24) week link in the Home Page and let the students figure it out.

This has come up before, and it would be interesting to be able to highlight the current week - of course you could manually 'Bold' each week as it comes up, I guess....

[james_whalley · Accepted solution]

Hello @mimip1,

We have a few instructors doing this at Cornell. For their sites, they are actively changing the url and text of a single button to take students to the current module. I wonder if you could embed a Google Sheet in a small part of the window and have a Google Apps Script set up to hide and display links based on the current date.

I know other instructors who organize their modules in reverse chronological order (newest on top) and set publishing dates, so the newest module is always the top one. Would something like that work for you?

Best,

James

[NicoletteStaley]

@mimip1 If you are comfortable writing the Javascript that would render a button for the current date on the page, you might be able to do this by composing the HTML for the page outside of Canvas (including the relevant JS in the HTML page), and uploading the HTML file to the course.  You can then embed the HTML file (with the JS) on the desired page in the course.  Canvas will not scrub the JS from the HTML when it is included within an <iframe>. 

If you wanted to be able to compose most of the page's content in the RCE to easy editing, you could make the <iframe> the side of your desired button and have the HTML/JS file only consist of button itself.