[Courses] Comprehensive Course Search Tool (Searching Course Content for a Topic)

[tweiler]

I always find it useful to search for content using an index or an actual search tool rather than just scrolling through all of the pages one by one to find what I need.  I can see many uses for this:

1. As a student, I know that a particular topic was covered but I'm not sure where.  I can search the course for the keyword and the page hits will come up.
2. As an instructor, I want to know where else these students have seen a particular concept.  I can search a bunch of courses for a keyword and the courses and page hits will come up.
3. As a student, as I am trying to integrate information from multiple lectures within a course or within multiple courses, it would be useful to see where a particular concept has been covered.

Tracey

[tr_jbates]

A real course content search would be extremely helpful for our course content development team, especially when a course is transferred from one instructor to another and all occurrences of the old instructor and contact information need to be changed.  We're currently the only ones who can do this because we have access to the APIs, but individual instructors have to follow a more tedious process.

[wmonroe]

We're going through this course transfer process now and I share the need.  More specifically, we're looking at mapping the course to standards, and if I could search for keyword from learning objectives or essential knowledge statements it would be most helpful.  I'll likely be going the API route as it is now...which is work.  If someone has some open source code that we might use to start with, I'd happily try to make it better :0)

[mcsmith]

 @tweiler ​, thank you for posting to the community. We couldn't agree more that there is valid benefit for a course and/or global search tool; I totally see how this would be valuable. However, with the amount of work on our roadmap we will not be able to commit to this within the next 12 months. This feature is an immense amount of work because we'd need to essentially index all the text in a given course (or institution), as well as filter results based on what a user does/doesn't have access to see.

With that said, this is something I think is important and do not want to lose sight of. We are doing a lot of work around content (Commons for example) and searching enhancements need to be considered.

Thank you!

[scott]

Having the searching capability throughout the course would be a wonderful enhancement.  Right now I am dealing with the over 150 page limitation, so being able to just search the page would be good.  This would also need to be in the "linking" area when you are trying to link pages. Modules is another place where it tends to get lengthy.  Can you start in these areas, and move to the bigger picture later?

[thatcher_bohrma]

Even if it were only search for instructors and admins it would be valuable in support work.

[lknott]

Although this topic has been archived, I did find an Institution that utilizes a tool called iSeek, which is essentially an academic search engine, right inside of Canvas. Canvas doesn't have an official relationship with iSeek but it may be something worth looking into until we can get the search function on our Product roadmap.

[doc_rudolph]

How does one get access to iSeek?

[luy3001]

Did anyone manage to get access to iSeek? Does it work as you expected?

[1353520195]

I'm curious if a global search function has inched its way any closer to the top of Canvas' feature road map over the last year?  We use iSeek and have run into some limitations, mainly because it does not inherit Canvas' user permissions, so we would really like to see Canvas come up with a solution.

[ldelangel]

I'm interested to see if this will be taken up anytime soon. As others have mentioned in this thread, we are a medical school (Cornell University) working on some online modules that could REALLY benefit from something like this. Deactivated user​. Thank you!