[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]

Aha, let me try again! 🙂

https://community.canvaslms.com/community/instcon/instructurecon-2018/blog/2018/06/22/ask-engineerin... 

Thanks  @stevensons ‌!

[orwinr]

Hi  @sstevenson_1960 ,

We piloted Atomic Search since January and really liked it and now have it fully implemented here at the iSchool. We really like it and are happy to pay for the functionality until something is permanently baked into Canvas itself. The folks at Atomic Jolt have been great to work with.

[colleen_harmon]

I agree: having an internal course search feature would save both me and my students time and effort when looking for specific items. As others have mentioned, only published items should be indexed.

On a related note, I know that one bonus of having a Google search appliance is that it's possible to analyze and report user interactions with the content: which pages were viewed, how many times they were viewed, average time spent on a page, etc.

This type of page-level analysis would be very helpful for those of us who design and teach  courses. I'd like to see how many students viewed a particular page, how many times, and the average time spent interacting with each page. This would clue me in to possible issues of content overload or "fluff" pages, help me recognize valuable go-to reference pages, or give me other types of information that would help me improve my courses.

When you look at providing search, please also consider bundling it with deeper content interaction reporting.

[laurakgibbs]

Hi  @colleen_harmon ‌! This was just the kind of thing that carroll-ccsd‌ and others were lobbying for an InstructureCon: analytics as a kind of feedback from students to help us improve the content and our teaching. 

Sad to say, when I asked at the "Ask Engineers Anything" panel about global search, they explained that the permissions were causing unforeseen problems; I was hoping they would then say they had narrowed the scope from global search to something they could implement more easily, but instead it sounds like everything related to search has been indefinitely postponed. I'm frustrated because I know the vendor Atomic Jolt has offers a search service, but at a (steep) cost. I find it hard to urge people to develop content in Canvas if they are not going to be able to do digital search of their own content.

I've given up even trying to figure out how search works right now in Commons (a search for "sarcasm" seems to return everything authored by people named Sarah; a search for "texting" returns everything with the word "text" or "textbook"... and a search for "elephant" returns all kinds of stuff, including elephants, but also every mention of electricity and elections... like it just searches on the first three letters of any string???). In any case, without an accurate and in-depth search engine, that collection of material in Commons is going to become increasingly unusable. Having Commons preview will be helpful, but we need a real search (including content search, not just titles and tags) for Commons to achieve its potential.

[DeletedUser]

I believe ANGEL had a content search feature in its Course Guide (see page 17 of the 7.3 instructor guide), but I don't recall if it searched titles only or actual text as well.

[mcgiansa]

Our department regularly used the Discussions search function, and it recently stopped working to search within all discussion text. We need it to be brought back, or suggestion for another option that is searchable.

[laurakgibbs]

I don't use the Discussions, so I wasn't aware of a change there; I'm pinging awilliams‌ to see if he might know something about that.

One of the reasons that I like using a blog network for my classes (instead of Discussion) is because I really value the search feature.

And, ahem, I think we all know now that I have pretty strong feelings about the value of search. 🙂

[Renee_Carney]

 @mcgiansa  

Did you submit a support ticket when you noticed the search stopped working in discussions as you expected it to?  If not, please do.

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @mcgiansa 

I just tested this by grabbing a line of text (okay, only two words) specific to a single  post in one of my discussions, and searching for it. Canvas found the entry flawlessly. I then searched for a somewhat more common term, and Canvas found every post containing that term.

Sooo................. either what you are searching for is not in the discussion you are searching, or it is a bug, and I would suggest contacting Canvas Support.

I hope this helps,

Kelley

[rbagent]

Not for accreditation, but we have a professional development Canvas site and it would be very helpful if faculty could quickly search for what they need to know. We are quickly finding there are too many pages to easily navigate.