Our My Courses widget has went through many iterations and changes since our initial release of Daylight. One of our changes in 2018 was introducing a new sorting order for courses using the “UpdatedSortLogic” configuration variable, intended to better organize the courses in the My Courses widget.
The updated sort logic presents both both pinned and unpinned courses in the My Courses Widget, promoting the pinned courses to be displayed first in the widget. This behavior has already adopted by most of our customers.
We had previous communicated our plans to retire the ability to set UpdatedSortLogic=Off and opt-out of the new sorting logic as part of our January 2021 release; however we are changing this date to July 2021 to ensure that any institutions using the old logic have time to adapt with minimal impact to users.
Why we changed the sort logic?
When the My Courses widget first shipped as part of Daylight in 2016, it auto-pinned new courses as a user was enrolled in them, displaying the newest courses first. Only the first 12 pinned courses would be displayed on the homepage, with any unpinned courses being buried under “View All Courses”.
While this worked well for users with a small number of courses, this auto-pinning behaviour didn’t work well for all users, especially teachers with courses in multiple semesters or administrators with access to a large number of courses. We were unable to find an “auto-pinning” heuristic that would work in way that would make sense for all our market segments, personas, and use cases, so we decided to adopt a new approach.
The updated sorting logic in the My Courses Widget does not auto-pin courses, and allows the end-user to pin and rearrange courses in an order that makes sense to them. The updated sort logic tries to populate the widget with up-to 12 courses, starting with the user’s pinned courses, then pulling in un-pinned courses by enrolment date until the widget contains 12 courses (more details around the updated sorting logic). The result is that most users get a sensible My Courses Widget with no intervention on their part, while pinning and customization is still available for the users who need it.
New Features in the My Courses Widget with UpdatedSortLogic=On
Pinned Courses Tab
To facilitate the transition from the old logic of the My Courses Widget where it only showed pinned courses, we introduced the “Pinned” tab. This tab displays only the courses that a user has pinned, similar to the old sort logic. This tab only appears when a user has one or more course pinned – we do not display tabs to the user that contain 0 courses.
Grouped Courses Tab
As an additional tool to facilitate surfacing relevant courses to users, we’ve also introduced the ability to show courses on tabs according to the course’s Semester, Department or Role Alias. Instructors who are managing both courses in the current semester, as well as have access to old semesters and upcoming semesters, often find this grouping very useful.
Similar to the pinned tab, tabs only appear when they contain at least 1 course. If all of a user’s active courses belong to a single grouping, ie: “Fall 2021 Semester”, the grouping tabs will not appear.
Grouped tabs do not appear by default in the My Courses widget - they can be enabled for the entire organization via the Customize Widget option. You must have the "Manage My Courses Widget” role permission in order to customize the My Courses Widget.
How to change the config variable
You can identify which sort order you are using by checking in the Brightspace Config Variable Browser. The My Courses Widget sorting logic is controlled by the d2l.Tools.MyCoursesWidget.UpdatedSortLogic config variable. You may want to examine how the widget appears on your test site with the updated logic before changing the variable for your production site.
The Brightspace default value has been “ON” since June of 2018, so you can set the configuration On by resetting the variable to its default value.
Following Up
The old behavior of the My Courses Widget will be retired in July of 2021. D2L Technical Account Managers and Customer Success Managers will be reaching out to the clients who are currently using the UpdatedSortLogic=Off over the next couple months.