Question

Is it possible to hide the "Files" area by default globally for ALL new course creations, imports, copies, etc.?

We are finding out when importing Blackboard material, the "Files" area is visible to students and sometimes that'll include any answer guides from the previous Blackboard course.  Canvas to Canvas copies can also catch new faculty off guard if the Files area was available from the previous semester.

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @StephenPerez,

I have looked at this in the recent past, and I don't think there is an incredibly simple solution to the issue.  I have a few commets around this:

You can definitely setup a course, disable the files menu, and make that a template for your Canvas account, meaning all new courses will have files disabled like your template course does.  This is easy, but I think you've discovered there are caveats to it...

The biggest caveat to the template is that it only affects new courses, and if teachers import from a prior course with the files menu enabled, the menu will basically get enabled again in the new course as part of the import.  So how can this be solved?

One idea would be to write an API script to go through every course in your Canvas instance, and disable the files menu.  For a developer-type person, this is actually a relatively simple task (as perhaps an intermediate developer with decent Canvas API and some python knowledge, this would probably take an hour or so to do from scratch without much error checking or commenting, a few hours more for a polished version) .  The issue we ran into when considering this though is that many courses were designed to have the files menu visible, directing students to go there and find content, rather than providing direct links through announcements, pages, modules, or other areas of Canvas.  Figuring out which courses needed files enabled and which did not was not going to be an easy task at all.  I suppose you could just disable it for all courses and tell your teachers they should go re-enable it if they wish, but those sorts of changes are often very contentious and not something we wanted to do here.

Hope this small discussion piece helps!

-Chris