Our college would like to disable the Core Canvas tool "Syllabus" by default, so that it automatically doesn't show on Course Navigation menus. Is that possible?
A fellow admin asked our CSM about disabling Syllabus by default, but the CSMs may be understandably busy at the moment.
Below I rounded up some past comments suggesting approaches to a disabling Conferences. However, I'm very new to this, and the comments are five years old, so I am not sure whether these remain relevant and whether there are any new approaches. Thanks!
Background
Why? Our school is using Simple Syllabus, so it is on the Course Navigation menu. It is confusing to have both. In addition, there is a state mandate that syllabi be public, and having an automatic "syllabus" tab encourages faculty to post a separate copy of their syllabus, or post additional stuff that could arguably be called a syllabus because that's the tab name in the LMS. (Even if they upload a PDF from Simple Syllabus, or paste exactly the same text, whenever there are two versions of something, they don't both stay up to date…)
What would solve our problem
Acceptable outcomes include:
- By default, the Syllabus tab is not on the Course Navigation menu. It may or may not be possible to enable it again in individual courses. We would have a different tab called "Simple Syllabus."
- A tab named "Syllabus" exists, but the Simple Syllabus content is embedded in it. (The tab may or may not still include the Course Summary.)
- What was called the "Syllabus" tab is now just called "Course Summary" or "Schedule" and only has the auto-populated "Course Summary."
If the solution still has a tab called "Syllabus," the tab should definitely not give the current directions to the instructor: "You can add any other comments, notes, or thoughts you have about the course structure, course policies or anything else." For our school, that information should be added directly to the Simple Syllabus or covered in intro materials if it is less important.
Approaches
Some comments from over 5 years ago discuss "do you know if it's possible to hide the Canvas installed apps by default?" after a blog post about a hiding external LTIs. I'm not sure if the answers is still valid.
Tabs API
One comment refers to a Tabs API, to change it course by course. (The Tabs API is documented here. The documentation says: "Home and Settings tabs are not manageable, and can’t be hidden or moved," from which I would like to infer that all other tabs can be hidden and moved.)
❓️Q1. Please confirm the Tabs API can hide the Syllabus tab.
Customizing theme with JavaScript
Others say that adding JavaScript in the theme could hide the Syllabus tab across an account, but "once you hide the tool in the custom theme it becomes inaccessible" to people who want to use it, and this solution would not hide it in the app. (Technically our school does not support the app, but we know students use it…)
❓️Q2. Please confirm the above interpretation of the custom theme approach is (still) correct.
Other approaches
There was also a thoughtful answer from @jperkins, but I couldn't understand how much of it was relevant to Core Canvas tools vs. LTI tools (the topic of the original post):
There is no default way to customize default native Canvas tabs. The API is the only way to do hide the navigation items in a course (other than UI). Conferences is a plugin on Instructure's side and we can technically disable it entirely (uninstall not hidden) that makes that navigation item disappear.
I've seen some people get creative with Blueprint courses to update custom navigation, but there are some nuances with that (you should be really familiar with how blueprint courses work).
For automated solutions, you could configure a Canvas Live Events subscription that will send an event to an external server that could then update the course nav in near real time.
❓️Q3. Please indicate which native tabs other than Conferences can be uninstalled.
❓️Q4. Please indicate if there's anything new relevant to Blueprint courses? (for completeness — we do not use these)
❓️Q5. Please confirm that for Canvas Live Events, we could set it up so that some event (like creating a course?) would trigger the Tabs API to be run on that course. Any suggestions of appropriate events?
❓️Q6. Any new approaches to solving this? Any other ways to automate the Tabs API?
❓️Q7. Any SimpleSyllabus-specific approaches to solving this? E.g. could we automatically embed content hosted by SimpleSyllabus into the Syllabus tab or force a redirect from the Syllabus tab to the Simple Syllabus tab?
Tagging people involved in the conversation about hiding core Canvas elements: @helfco @Chris @qnguyen @dtod @jperkins Thanks!
