[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

[laurakgibbs]

I understand the difficulty of totally indexing all content, but I was staggered to find out that not even the course description is available in search. I diligently added keywords and a brief description to my courses, making them public so that I could share them at my school, but when I search our public courses, it seems clearly that ONLY the title field is being searched; the description field is not even being searched. That makes the public course space essentially useless. Is there maybe a setting our admin can set so that there will be a search of the course descriptions at least? These screenshots illustrate the problem I am seeing at our Canvas installation:

My course is public; here is how it appears (I changed the title in order to make it more useful than the automatic label assigned by our enrollment system, and I added a course description):

A search for a term that appears in the course title works:

A search for a term that appears in the description returns no results (note also that it does not say "no results" — the screen just stays blank):

I would like to take Canvas seriously as a platform, but that is very hard to do when there is apparently (?) no way to search on keywords in the course descriptions.

[jessica_wells17]

This would be very useful. 

[g_r_saward]

In terms of general content navigation, some people are browsers, others are searchers.  A tool for searching within a course would be very useful to cater for the latter.

While a good topic structure inside a course helps learners navigate through content, search often becomes more dominant especially as content grows (think gmail which was entirely search driven when introduced, or Amazon which has become more search driven).

Guy

p.s. the link to more info on the product radar at the top of the page to seems broken, as does  @Renee_Carney 's link, but the following got me where I wanted to go, today at least ... https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/blog/2016/10/27/new-ideation-stage-product-radar

[laurakgibbs]

The browsing environment for public courses is also VERY poor. So, I would reiterate my plea above for expanded public course search to include the DESCRIPTION, not the whole course contents. We could make the public course space much more useful by being able to include keywords in the description space. Being limited to searches on the title is effectively useless.

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1165-comprehensive-course-search-tool-searching-course-content... 

Knowing that the description is being indexed and searched would also be an incentive for people to include descriptions. I was diligently including descriptions with keywords, but then I realized it was pointless since that area is not searched.

Would it make sense to enter a separate feature request for indexing of the descriptions on the public courses area in order to facilitate searching? Browsing is just not a viable option. This is a really terrible UI for browsing.

It would be amazing, of course, to be able to search public courses by content, but even just a search by course description would help increase access to and usefulness of public courses.

[g_r_saward]

Hi Laura.  I think we might have slightly different aims - you for finding a course (Tracy's original use cases 2 and 3), and me for finding content within a specific course (use case 1) - though the former would certainly help the latter.  Any work in this area would be appreciated.

[laurakgibbs]

Yes,  @g_r_saward  - different, but related. That's why I'm thinking a separate feature request might be in order (although I don't really understand the feature request process; it seems kind of chaotic).

I consider open public courses to be Canvas's single biggest strength as an LMS (yes, that's just my opinion... but a strongly held one!), but until Canvas itself lets us make better use of that shared, public course ecosystem, people aren't going to realize its value.

Then, of course, if/when there is good searching across public courses, being able to also search on full course content would be even more valuable.

Just imagine how much that could help students as they seek out courses that would be of interest to them! That's one of my main goals here: how do we help students choose courses based on the actual course content, as opposed to RateMyProfessors.com ratings...?

[g_r_saward]

Even more interesting!  I was guessing from post that you are from US where a liberal arts culture promotes student choice of courses. In the UK, we generally have much more structured programmes where choice is more limited ... and consequently RateMyProfessor is less influential!

p.s. nice avatar - "Cat in hat" 60th anniversary made the news this week :^)

[e01166]

Global search within a course would also be very helpful during the course development and maintenance. Global find and replace would also be a huge help. Seemingly simple things, like teacher contact information throughout the class, can be hard to find when sharing the class with another teacher. 

[laurakgibbs]

AGREED. One of the reasons I do all my course content outside of Canvas is because there was no internal search feature, and I also need to be able to do tagging and labeling. The online textbook (UnTextbook!) for one of my classes has 2500 pages in it, which is totally do-able in a blog with search and label features:

Mythology and Folklore UN-Textbook 

I doubt I would ever try to do content development like that ever in Canvas, but even for more limited content development, the environment strikes me as being very poor. I am used to real tools like blogs, wikis, GoogleDocs, etc. for content development, and search tools are a big part of that, along with labels/tags and folders. 

For what it's worth, when a course is public, you can use Google to do a search of the contents; I can search my Widget Warehouse (open Canvas course) by adding site:canvas.ou.edu/courses/54178/ to the Google search:

https://goo.gl/DR2Qrt 

[laurakgibbs]

Aha, yes,  @g_r_saward  in so many ways your undergrad degrees are more like U.S. masters degree programs. I did an M.Phil. at Oxford a gazillion years ago and was both fascinated and baffled by the differences in university systems!

Cat in the Hat was in my class announcements this week because of Dr. Seuss's birthday on March 2, which I always commemorate:

Online Course Announcements: Sunday, March 2 

I use foxes of various kinds as my avatars online; my academic specialty is Aesop's fables, so I am honoring the fabled fox. Fox-in-Socks is a favorite. 🙂