Linking to another Canvas page from the Simple Syllabus

[JeriseFogel]

Hello all--My institution has adopted Simple Syllabus. I am struggling to find a way to link from within that Syllabus to other pages in my Course. One example: in the "Course Materials" section, I want to link to a page where I compiled some additional readings, not required but recommended. When I link using the URL (which is the only option I can see for linking), it embeds the entire Canvas site within the "Course Materials" frame, which looks weird (it duplicates the left hand bar, for instance).

Any solutions welcome! Thank you!

[BrianLester]

I'm not familiar with Simple Syllabus- but Canvas already has functionality within the Rich Content Editor.

Open the page or assignment in which you wish to create the link to another item in your course

Click on the link icon and choose course links, the you'll be able to choose the page, assignment etc you want to link to on the right

Using this approach will avoid the page inception issue you are seeing.

[JeriseFogel]

Hi, Brian--

That's just the problem: in this section of Simple Syllabus at least (I don't know about in the other segments), I'm not given the option to include a Course link: it ONLY shows an external link.

[James · Accepted solution]

@JeriseFogel 

First, let me encourage you to not do this. At the end, I'll tell you how if you still want to.

We use Simple Syllabus. One of the really cool things about Simple Syllabus is the ability to roll your syllabus over from term to term. Faculty who have a standard syllabus that doesn't change much love it. People like me who do a lot of customizations to my syllabus hate it.

Why? Because when I generated my syllabi inside WordPerfect (yes, I still use that), I use variables -- Simple Syllabus calls them blocks. I have the last date a student can turn in work about four different places in my syllabus. I change it once in WordPerfect and it updates through my syllabus. I have to manually change it every place in Simple Syllabus. And if someone knows how to create and maintain user-defined blocks in Simple Syllabus, please let me know.

What does that have to do with what you want? I have not tested this, but I have serious doubts that Simple Syllabus will update those links when you roll the course over. When you go to a new course, the course ID in the URL changes. The students in the new course don't have access to the old course so the links won't work. That means you're going to have to go through and change every one of them with every courses that starts with the Simple Syllabus.

Depending on how much customization you need to make, that is a major pain. I also have a weekly calendar of topics because the state group that approves syllabi wants to see how much time we spend on each topic, not just by "section 3.1" or "3.1 homework", which is what Simple Syllabus imports from Canvas. It's broken down by week and I put the actual dates in the syllabus. I cannot simply say "Week 1" because the topics change each term because of holidays. Simple Syllabus makes it downright painful for me to update this. It is designed to be Simple (as the name infers), not powerful. The date headings are level 2 in my WordPerfect Syllabus but must be level 3 in Simple Syllabus. I ended writing a script that would generate the HTML needed, then I open the browser's developer tools, edit the HTML directly, and paste in my code. Updating a link or two isn't as problematic, but I'm just sharing things people don't think about when they first set it up.

Another reason I doubt that Simple Syllabus will change those links is that Canvas is not meant to be embedded within other pages and definitely not within itself. More reason for Simple Syllabus to not update the links is that the syllabi might be available to the public. Your Canvas course probably isn't, so those links wouldn't work for anyone not in your class.

Let's say that you really think it's important to have those links, you don't mind manually updating them each term (you may change your mind on this after you have to do it), and you don't have to worry about people outside the class seeing the links.

From your image, it looks like it is leaving Simple Syllabus when you click on a link, but staying within Canvas.

I seem to recall that there is some query parameter you can put on a URL that will tell Canvas not to display the navigation menu. That was years ago when I was dealing with it and I don't remember right now. It might have been something like headless. I think that had to do with embedding a page in an iframe, which is not what you want to do. What you want to do is just navigate to that page and not have a Canvas within Canvas.

You may think you want to just display the page where Simple Syllabus was. But technically what you need to do is just go to that page in Canvas. You don't want to stay on the Simple Syllabus page.

So, let's step outside Simple Syllabus for a moment.

The question now becomes whether you want the link to open in a new tab or replace the existing tab?

Breaking out of an iframe to replace the existing window is more challenging. Simple Syllabus doesn't have an HTML editor -- at least not that I've found.  It can involve entering JavaScript, which may get blocked (I don't know, but Canvas strips JavaScript out of user content so it's not unheard of). I do not recommend this.

Opening in a new tab would leave Simple Syllabus visible. This is what happens in Canvas when you link to an external site. To Simple Syllabus, Canvas is external. That may not make sense, but think of it this way -- Canvas is not hosted by Simple Syllabus, your content in Canvas is not contained on the Simple Syllabus website.

To open a link in a new tab, you can add target="_blank" within the link HTML code. You cannot edit the HTML to do this within Simple Syllabus, but it turns out you don't have to.

When you create a link, there is a checkbox for "Open in new tab". You can also edit the link and check that box. When you check that, it should open in a new tab and not be embedded within the existing Canvas page.

[JeriseFogel]

Thank you, James, for your detailed response! I do not use the "rollover" mechanism for my courses generally, even when they are the same course in a different semester, because I find that the links don't usually work, especially if they refer to pages within my original course (the pages/files are not transferred to the next course properly), so I wind up having to recreate them anyway.

That said: I will try out the "open in new tab" idea, but I was really hoping to simply be able to include a link to my page, outside Simple Syllabus but within my Course, the way I can include those links in other pages of my Course. I guess that is not in the cards for Simple Syllabus, however.

It's kind of aggravating, but after spending substantial time LAST semester and the year before making things look beautiful with the new "design" elements--and then setting my beautiful new Syllabus as my Home page--, I can't use those design elements in Simple Syllabus (they do not pop up), and I also can't link easily to other pages within my course; plus, our institution is moving to using ONLY Simple Syllabus, not the regular old "Syllabus," next semester. So, I think I will need to create an independent "front page" for each of my courses that includes all of my beautiful looking syllabus, and just keep the "basics" on the "Simple Syllabus" page, and not expect my students to look at that (or even possibly actively tell them NOT to look there, since all the extra details and information and links can be found on my "front page" syllabus).

But I appreciate very much your detailed explanation and attempt to help.

[James]

Proper links within Canvas should migrate correctly when copying content from another course. If not, it's possible that they were not formed properly -- including content from another course. If not, you should reach out to someone to see why not.

Simple Syllabus is an external program to Canvas.

I have my own syllabus as well. Simple Syllabus is too simple for me. Mine looks beautiful, has headers and tables marked up for accessibility, and is consistent throughout. There are things I just cannot do with Simple Syllabus and the way the people set it up.

Other users find Simple Syllabus very nice to use.

Since we're training our students to use Simple Syllabus (our Canvas Admin wants to remove all of the links to the Syllabus page and only leave Simple Syllabus to avoid confusion to the students), I put as much of my content into Simple Syllabus as I could and then I added a line at the top that this is not the official syllabus for the course and I gave a link to the official syllabus, which is on a website outside Canvas.

If you really, really, really wanted to do an link to something in Canvas, you would visit the resource in Canvas, copy the link, and then paste that into Simple Syllabus and tell it to open in a new tab. You won't be able to find the content from within the Rich Content Editor like you can with Canvas.

In my opinion, putting the syllabus in the HTML of a the syllabus page is a huge waste of time and that's what Simple Syllabus essentially does. It prevents students from seeing the information about the due dates that shows up on the page. Instead, I take four lines and link to files that contain the information and update those files each term.

I also told my Canvas Admin that I wasn't going to universally hide the Syllabus menu because I actually use it and keep it updated in Canvas and it has benefits that Simple Syllabus does not. However, many faculty fail to check their Syllabus page in Canvas and have syllabi from years ago that aren't getting updated now that we have Simple Syllabus. Faculty forget to go in and clean up their pages and we don't have an enforcement or quality control group on campus to do this.

I think what we may end up doing is letting faculty know we're going to hide it and that if they want it, they need to go through and restore the Syllabus page to the navigation tabs. That way, people like me can keep it, but other people who probably don't even realize their page is set that way, can get it cleaned up.