Linking to pages in a tab on a Canvas page

[RonaldLee]

Hello community!

I have recently started designing a few of my course pages using tabs (and I love it as opposed to needing to have separate pages for students to navigate to).  I've been able to copy and paste html codes to get what I've wanted but am having trouble with one last item and am curious if there's a (easy?) solution that I'm not aware of because I really don't know html.

On the last of a sequence of tabs (e.g. say 5 tabs), I'd like students to click on that 5th tab, but instead of linking to a section, I'd like it to link to and open a different page in canvas (which itself will be a new page with another set of tabbed content).  

I've noticed that while all of the content of the new page will open up (i.e., I see the tabs for page 2 and all of the content, etc.), the page itself is still the first page (I don't know if this is clear - basically, the address for the page in the address bar does not change).  Functionally, I wouldn't care since this seems to work when I'm clicking around BUT I've noticed some wonky issues when I'm in Student view... (hard to explain, but I can post a screen shot if it's helpful).

To further elaborate - a possible workaround is to place a button somewhere else on the page, such as within the content of one of the tabs or above the tabs - and this works to link to a different page BUT this messes with the continuity of the visuals (i.e., I can't stand the way it looks!) - so I'm hoping to be able to link to a different page using the tab itself.

Help?

[kmeeusen · Accepted solution]

Hi @RonaldLee 

Doing what you described would result in a new instance of Canvas opening in a new tab on a browser or just opening a new instance of Canvas on a mobile device. Not ideal.

What I do when I want this action is center a link to the "Next" canvas page at the bottom of the last tabbed page. That way your page of tabbed content looks good, and students can naturally move to the next page of tabbed content.

Good luck,

Kelley

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @RonaldLee …

It’s great to see that you are trying different ways to display content for you and your students.  To add to what my friend @kmeeusen stated, it is worth noting that using the HTML code to make tabs on your page (by using examples here: Solved: Tabs - Instructure Community and Solved: Tabs - Instructure Community) does not work well on mobile devices.  In fact, I do not believe that tabs would show up within the Canvas mobile apps like they do using a standard web browser on your computer.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Instructure has indicated that the code used to display tabs will eventually be retired and unusable in its current format.  So, even though I’m not real sure on the timeline, it may stop working at some point.  There is a bit of conversation about this in the links I’ve provided above.

I hope this will be of some extra help to you.  Let Community members know if you have any other questions about this…thanks.