[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

[stevensons]

I would also love to see this. A Pages Search tool in particular would be very useful. I have a large number of pages and it would be much easier to be able to search by a keyword in the page title rather than scrolling and scrolling until I find the page I need.
Thanks!

[873179959]

We would love to see this too.  It would be incredibly helpful for students and faculty in courses, but it would also enable Canvas to be used for other things like faculty or student resource portals, trainings, etc.  We have a Faculty Resource Portal with all kinds of information and resources for all of our faculty, and it acts as a space for faculty to share ideas.  If that resource portal could be searchable, it would be a game changer.  We try to organize content intuitively in modules, but there is just so much in there!

[pvanallen]

I agree, search would be very useful. Given the comments from Instructure on this difficulty of this, I'd suggest that a simple version, that just searches within published course content, for a particular course, would be a great first step. That would limit the amount of indexing needed, as well as the scope of the search.

This would still be highly valuable for my students. I have a lot of both informational and technical content in my courses, and the ability to go back and find content after it was used earlier in the course is key the application and integration of the knowledge.

I've just converted my courses over from a personally built and hosted Wordpress site. In Wordpress, a simple plugin adds interactive search. This is the biggest thing I miss within Canvas, in an otherwise pretty successful conversion.

[e01166]

I would add my voice to the request for this course level search capability. We use Canvas to "flip" meetings. The ability to search through notes and content from past meetings would be extremely useful. Of course, this is just an additional use to all the need for search outlined above.

[rvq5027]

I agree. The tool is not user friendly when it comes to searching for certain keywords or topic list. I find myself flipping thru the modules manually.

[griffis]

My students frequently ask me how they can search through all the content pages that I post in my courses. I often have 100 or more pages worth of content in a single course, and while I try to title the pages logically it can still take time to find what they need.

Please open this idea again for voting.

[Renee_Carney]

  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...

[1353520195]

I am glad to see voting open again for this and that it is on the "Product Radar".  I hope this eventually gets implemented because it is a top 3 ask from many of our users / admin.

[pvanallen]

Yes, great to see this open for voting again - put your vote in!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, an implementation of search within a course would satisfy most needs. Keeping the scope narrow to satisfy 90% of the need, sooner, is fine with me.

[jonathan_carlyo]

This would be very helpful for finding items "on the tip of my tongue", that is, items that I remember from, say, question 7 on quiz 4, but I can't remember if it was question 7 on quiz 4: I can only remember the keyword.

It seems similar to the Course Link Validator, but even less complex??