[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

[colleen_harmon]

Thanks for your response, Laura.

I'm not sure why permissions would pose a problem if Canvas searched only course-wide published content and avoided, for example, the Inbox or individual discussions. That's interesting, but troubling. Maybe the way courses are architected is an issue such that separating searchable content isn't straightforward. Hmmm.

Judging by the other responses here, it looks like Canvas should partner with Google and get its search appliance integrated onto their platform. They could partition it along the lines they already partition their LMS, so each institution would get its own slice of the pie, and then each institution could further parse it by CRN. That way, faculty and students could search through all the published course-wide content.

[laurakgibbs]

I really don't know what the specific problems were, and when I asked at the engineering panel at InstructureCon, I did not have a clearer understanding afterwards, which also makes me discouraged about future prospects; with the other projects they were working on, I got a strong sense of enthusiasm and forward momentum (which is great), but not so with search. But hopefully they will surprise us with something good because I know that resources are probably limited everywhere; paying extra to be able to search our own content really does not make sense to me, although I am glad that option is available for the schools that can pay for that service.

[Renee_Carney]

The Radar‌ idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

[laurakgibbs]

I will be really curious to see where this goes in terms of priorities. I thought that by being upvoted at Khaki, that gave it a high priority, but from the comments at InstCon Engineering Panel I couldn't really tell what was happening. It will be good to have an update!

[wigginsj]

My hope is that it will let me search every course I have taught for a particular student's name.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

 @mcgiansa ‌, were you wanting to search through all your discussions, or just one discussion?  Search only works within one discussion.  The search on the discussion index page only searches topic titles on that page, not discussion posts.   Sure wish it did!  I just clarified that on the discussion index documentation page.

[laurakgibbs]

Agreed,  @Nancy_Webb_CCSF ‌! And this is why I am so disappointed at the lack of follow-up to the search initiative from Project Khaki. Nothing resulted from that initiative, but maybe if there were a structured discussion, where we could talk about our priorities, and engineering could explain about their options and limitations, we could actually make some forward progress. It's very frustrating to be here in a new school year without any progress: I understand that nothing came through in time for Project Khaki, but I am really disappointed by the lack of follow-up discussion in order to learn more about what users would really value about the different kinds of search possibilities, short of global search as it was (unrealistically) sketched out at Project Khaki.

[Nancy_Webb_CCSF]

That's a good idea, laurakgibbs, to set our target lower.  I was thinking of creating an idea to just be able to search through the all the discussion posts in one course. That probably wouldn't include group discussions but it's a start.

Then a separate request for search through Pages - or modules which would be really useful.

[laurakgibbs]

Exactly, there are different areas currently without search, and different reasons for wanting search in those areas,  @Nancy_Webb_CCSF ‌! I'm participating in a study group using Canvas and just discovered the lack of real discussion board search this week. Argh!

I'll ask for some guidance from  @Renee_Carney ‌ here: in the absence of anything specific back from Engineering, should we start documenting more specific use-cases for search and creating them as new ideas? I can see advantages/disadvantages of doing that, and since we never really got a clear explanation beyond "permissions" of what went wrong with the attempt at new search features, I'm not really sure how we can move the conversation forward -- that was my question at the AMA panel at InstCon too, and there was no real response then, so I'm stumped. Help!

[Renee_Carney]

I'd suggest looking through the existing ideas to see what is already out there.  Just because, off the top of my head, I know there are some ideas around discussion search.  Then, if you don't find what you're seeking, please do submit a unique idea.  The comments and votes on this thread are enough push for it to rise into the top 10% by vote.  There isn't anything more to do here at this time - to demonstrate priority, that is.