Link to an object in another course

[corellie]

I have a page in one course that I want to LINK to my other courses (so if I edit it, all courses see the latest edits).  I DONT want to copy it.  Ditto with a file.  Or an Announcement.  Any object.  It doesn't seem like Canvas will allow this (yes, links within a course are allowable).

[Chris_Hofer]

@corellie ...

Generally speaking, linking from one course to another is not recommended.  In most cases, students who are enrolled in one course are not also enrolled in the other course.  Or, only a handful of students might be enrolled in both courses...not all students.  If you link to content from course A to course B ... and students who are enrolled in course A are not enrolled in course B ... then those students would see an error message on their screen because they don't have access to that course.

I hope that will help a bit.  Sing out if you have any other questions about this...thanks!  Take care, and be well.

[corellie]

I want to link a page in my SANDBOX shell which has my Office Hours to my course shells.   I would not be linking course-to-course objects.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, @corellie ...

My apologies for a rather late response to your follow-up question.  I must have missed seeing your reply.  Have you come up with a solution for this?  One thought I had was to put your office hours within your Canvas profile.  Maybe consider putting your office hours in the "Biography" section?    How do I edit my profile in my user account as an instructor?  Then, you could make the "People" page in all of your courses visible to your students.  How do I manage Course Navigation links?  Students in any of your courses could then click on your name in the "People" page of your course to read your bio and look at your office hours.  This would essentially take the place of the page you've created in your sandbox course that you wanted to link out to in your courses.

Another option for you would be to create a document with your office hours in something like Google Docs.  Then, you would embed that document in all of your courses.  When you need to update the document with different hours, for example, you can update the Google Doc, and it will display all the updated information in all of your courses that you had embedded the document into.

Hope this extra bit of info helps a bit.  Sing out if you have any other questions...thanks!

[Chris_Hofer]

@corellie ...

I just read your newest posting before I think you must have deleted it?  What you had posted may not actually work. The reason it works for you is because you are enrolled in both your actual course and the sandbox course.  But, if the students in your normal course are not in your sandbox course, they will not be able to access that page in your sandbox course.

[corellie]

You are correct.  That is why I deleted. the post.  So I do not have a simple solution.  Thanks for your interest.

[gnoack]

You could try embedding a cloud based page, such as a Google Doc, into a page.  I've played around with it and it has worked, but I don't like how the embedded page looks. So, I deal with having to copy paste content from course to course.  

[corellie]

I'm sure that will work.  I was trying to stay within the boundaries of Canvas.

[hechla · Accepted solution]

@corellie  You can do exactly what you proposed in your original post. It's not the greatest solution but it works. We have a "library" of documents that we link to from all of our courses. Not all the articles in the library are linked to in every course, but there's some articles linked in multiple courses. We decided to create a new course in Canvas for our "resource library" and we set the Visibility to Institution so anyone who can login to our instance can access these articles. And it works for us, for now. We are looking for a better solution because we want better analytics, search, and workflow/editing permissions, etc.  

The only time it's an issue is when we run the Link Validation in our courses. Anything that's linked to our library course comes back with a warning that "Links to other courses in this resource may not be accessible by the students in this course." But we know we can ignore those because those are all to our library course. We don't link to any other courses.