Friendly course urls?

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rex1
Community Member

I tried searching for this and I cannot believe no one has asked this before, but is there a way to enable friendly URLs for Canvas?

For example, the current URL to a course looks something like:

instructure.com/courses/81

But is it possible to have a friendly URL that uses the course code instead? So it will show up as:

instructure.com/courses/ENG-101

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James
Community Champion

 @rex1 ,

Canvas already supports friendly course IDs.

I say friendly kind of tongue-in-cheek.

Before I get to what works, your suggestion is not unique. We have an English 101 course (maybe that's Engineering 101?) every term. Actually, we have multiple ones of them every term. Unless a teacher is teaching multiple sections without combining them, they all have a short code of "ENG 101" (We actually use ENGL, but that's besides the point).

What is unique is the SIS course ID. For example, my statistics course from the spring had a SIS course ID of sp20-math_113-01. I can actually put that into the URL, but I have to tell Canvas I'm doing it. My SIS course ID might have been 81 and then Canvas would have trouble deciding whether that 81 was their course ID or my course ID.


The way to tell Canvas that you're using a SIS course ID is to preface it with sis_course_id:

The pathname to my statistics course could be either one of these two:

/courses/2687822

/courses/sis_course_id:sp20-math_113-01

Note that the friendly code only gets you to the course. If you click on any of the course links after you get there, it uses the Canvas ID.

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