1. Found out the smart search surfaced unpublished pages. Please make sure unpublished content is not included in the search database. 2. User search logs could be valuable, as to show what students are looking for and things that may need improvements in their course design and delivery. Hope such search logs can be surfaced.
Would it make sense to have it clear in the documentation that the search picks up content based on what a user has access to? I think the initial suggestion point to wanting to make sure that students aren't returning results from content that they can't access, but from an Instructor perspective it would be useful to be able to have a flag on search items that aren't currently published.
I think that would be the best of both worlds. The search finds pages that are published and unpublished with a flag for the ones that are not published (or that students cannot access).
The second point you have here is one that our faculty have been asking for too. It would be helpful to get feedback on which resources users are searching for and using most in the course.
This is definitely an issue when students are searching. It goes beyond just unpublished content to. We present all our content via modules and hide the pages and files tool. My search results are returning pages that are old and haven't been deleted (a common thing that our academics will do is remove an item from the module section but not delete from the course completely), therefore the search is returning pages that students shouldn't be able to see.
If you tested with a user that only has a student role in a course and they can access the Unpublished content then that would definitely not be desirable as most faculty instructors would not want their students to access that type of material. As mentioned in some of the posts above, only the instructors should have access to the additional Unpublished material and students should be limited to only what they should have access to (some material maybe the instructor limited an assignment or exam to only certain students; and definitely not access to Unpublished material).
I'm trying to recreate the first point of seeing unpublished courses as a student, but I don't see anything if they are unpublished, even if I search for them. Can anyone reply how they can see it?
I also tried searching for unpublished content as a student (acting as a student in our beta environment) and unpublished items didn't appear for me either (which is good 😀)
Related to 1., students can also see snippets of content that should be locked to them (e.g., because the module doesn't open until a specific time or a prerequisite hasn't been completed) through search result previews.
