Possible Catalog Improvements

[zsgoreczky]

In the upcoming months, the Catalog team is excited to work on a few Catalog improvements. We are considering such projects that don’t require massive engineering effort, but that address real customer pain points in the product. You can find the list of potential projects below.

Please let us know what you think of these improvement ideas and leave a comment on how helpful they would be for your institution. 

1. Login workflow improvement: Checking for Canvas login automatically when accessing Catalog.  Currently, even if a user is logged into Canvas, they have to click the “Login” button before Catalog recognizes they are logged in. That, combined with the low-profile messaging about logging in on the registration page we show when one tries to enroll, results in lots of duplicate accounts being created for users that administrators have to triage in Canvas.
2. Login workflow improvement 2.: Routing users to the page they initiated login from after they login. It’s an unnatural workflow if a user is viewing a course they have found in the Catalog, log in, and then get kicked to the student dashboard. Currently, to get back to the course they have to go back to the Catalog, then find the course again or use their browser’s back button.
3. Search improvement: Adding tags to search. Currently, we don’t use tags when identifying search results and in this way users don’t get the full benefit of tags. 
4. Concluded courses: Supporting concluded course status. Currently, Catalog doesn’t track if a course has been concluded. Due to this, on the analytics dashboard we show these courses with the wrong status, and they are not shown in the student dashboard. 
5. Consistent time-zones: Having consistent time-zone settings across Canvas and Catalog. Currently, we don’t handle time-zones in a consistent way and they might be different at different parts of the product.