Create a single page, perhaps in my account, that can be shared to multiple courses

[MariahBirgen]

I want to create a single About Your Instructor (for example) page in Canvas that I can have linked to in all my courses. This way I only update the page in one place and it is updated everywhere.

What I am doing now is creating the page in one course, but then I need to copy to every other course I am teaching. Then, if something changes, I have to edit the page many times. Or, even worse, when I copy a course from another term, then I have multiple versions of the page in my course.

I know I can have a file that does this in my account, but I am trying to eliminate clicks for the students.

I could create a web page hosted somewhere else, but that really defeats the purpose of keeping everything behind the student's passwords.

[stimme · Accepted solution]

@MariahBirgen If your institution has enabled the user profile page, you could use that as a single source for students to get information about you. How do I edit my profile in my user account as an instructor? Students can navigate to your profile (or to those of their fellow students) if your People link is enabled in your course navigation menus.

If you want to link to your profile, you can form the URL like this: https://canvas.[yourschool].com/courses/[yourcourseid]/users/[youruserid] When you copy content with this link between courses, Canvas should automatically change the value of the course ID so that the link continues to work without additional editing. Good luck!

[stimme · Accepted solution]

@MariahBirgen If your institution has enabled the user profile page, you could use that as a single source for students to get information about you. How do I edit my profile in my user account as an instructor? Students can navigate to your profile (or to those of their fellow students) if your People link is enabled in your course navigation menus.

If you want to link to your profile, you can form the URL like this: https://canvas.[yourschool].com/courses/[yourcourseid]/users/[youruserid] When you copy content with this link between courses, Canvas should automatically change the value of the course ID so that the link continues to work without additional editing. Good luck!

[BrianLester · Accepted solution]

Using the Canvas user profile would work fine but if you want to customize the page then an embedded Google doc might do the trick.

If you have Google workspace you could follow the directions below provided by Stef_retired:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-LMS-Blog/Using-Google-Docs-for-dynamic-Canvas-content/ba-p...

[Hildi_Pardo]

What a great idea,  @stimme! Clever to use the Profile page.

@MariahBirgen - canvas doesn't have something like you're describing where you can create one Page that is automatically updated in all courses.  Each course is unique, and each page in each course has a unique ID.     So @BrianLester suggestion of using an embedded Google doc would definitely be a solution.   Your own idea of creating a webpage would be fine also -- assuming your students are permitted to view external websites, but I think you may not want your own info on a public web page. 

[paul_fynn]

Hi @MariahBirgen  - some good responses for you here from earlier replies.

We have multiple use cases where we want to 'mirror' content across courses, and we do this by having discipline, school or faculty pages that hold the content as pages or files.

There are two approaches to ensuring that students can access this central content:-

1. By making sure all students are bulk enrolled in the repository site (in our case by award code in either a community site or delivery code in a zero credit delivery site)

2. By making the repository site 'institutional access' - the downside of this is that because students are not enrolled in the repository site you will weaken or remove the analytics stats on use

In terms of how this is then presented in the destination Canvas courses, there are two (or more) options

A. The repository course asset is added as an external link either as a moduleitem or within the RCE (in the repository site a file needs to be 'available to anyone with the link')

B. The content is iframed into a page within the destination course

iframing results with Canvas within Canvas, and students can end up navigating down a rabbit hole - it would be useful to be able to switch the normal menus off. We had considered going back to pdfs etc. on the basis that this would be less technical and aesthetic overload, however testing reveals that when files are updated with a new version, at the time of testing the file link breaks in the app (it seems to work everywhere else). There have been some tangental fixes affecting image storage recently which might or might not have fixed this.

Notwithstanding the point that your use case is (as identified by other contributors) facilitated by the Canvas profile page, I go back to something I mentioned on the forum a while ago, which is that Instructure are missing a trick in not making it more straightforward to reuse Canvas RCE based and other content from a common source in a more elegant way than iframing allows.