It is great to see so many people from all over the world with so many different backgrounds using the Instructure Community website to share their ideas, ask and help answer questions, write blog posts (similar to what I'm doing here), and so much more!
I thought it might be fun to share some Community "Tips & Tricks" with all of you based on my own experiences using the Community site over the past several years. Some of these you might already be familiar with, but in other cases, you might be saying, "Wait...what?"
Update Your Profile
If you are new to the Instructure Community or if you've been here for several years, one of the best things you can do is to update your Community profile. When you post content to the Community or you read postings from others, a person's username appears next to the posting (which could be a form of your name or even a series of random characters). However, it does not display your actual name. This is where filling out your Instructure Community profile is quite helpful. That way, if you click on someone's username, you can see more information about that person. You can even choose a fancy panda avatar for your profile, or you can upload any other image you want such as a picture of yourself or a favorite personality or movie character, for example. Here's more information on how to do all of this: and .
The Power of the "@" Symbol to Mention Users
Did you know that you can "mention" other users here in the Community with the "@" symbol? Yup, you can! Simply type the "@" symbol (without the quotation marks), and then type the person's username here in the Community. For example, if I wanted to mention my friend, Kona Jones, here in this post, I could type the "@" symbol and then her username of "kona" (again, without the quotation marks)... like this:
The Community platform will try and match the username you type with existing users already in the Community. Sometimes, just a few letters of the person's username is enough to find him/her in the Community. Click on the user's name when you find it in your search, and a link will be created...like this: @kona. This also creates a notification for the user that you've tagged someone in your posting.
Now, another neat feature of mentioning people is that if you are replying to someone in a discussion topic, the Community platform is smart enough to list folks who have participated in the topic as soon as you start typing the "@" symbol ... so you don't necessarily need to remember what the person's username is.
More information on this can be found at: .
The Power of the "@" Symbol to Find Guides/Blogs/Discussion Topics
Yet another great feature of the "@" symbol is that you can use it to create links quickly to all kinds of content that exists here in the Community such as written Guides and video tutorials, blogs, discussion topics, and much more. For example, if I wanted to include a link to a Canvas Guide on how to reply to a discussion topic as an instructor, I can type something like this using the words "reply discussion instructor" (without the quotation marks):
Related documents which include Guides, discussion topics, and feature ideas will appear for you to choose from. The result you're looking for may not necessarily be the first item in the list for you to pick (I've not quite figured out those algorithms yet), but it should be close. (In the above example, the Guide for how to reply to a discussion as a student is appearing before the Guide for instructors.) Click on the appropriate one in the list, and it will be added to your posting....like this: . This is the only way I'm aware of to get the icon to appear in front of the link.
More information on this can be found at: .
Hyperlinks, Hyperlinks, and Hyperlinks
There are other ways you can add hyperlinks to your posts here in the Community. Let's say that you are looking at this page, Instructor Guide - Instructure Community, and you want to make a link to the Guide on how to create an online assignment.
- One way to do this is to right-click on a link to a Guide, and then select "Copy link" (or similar wording) from the pop-up menu. Then, within your Community posting, either right-click and paste the link, or hit the keyboard combination Ctrl + V (CMD + V on a Mac) to paste in the URL. It would look something like this: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-create-an-online-assignment/ta-p/950. As soon as you hit the spacebar after the last character in the URL, the link will become active. But here's the really cool thing! Left-click on the link, and you'll get a little pop-up menu with a few icons. One of those icons is the letter "A" for "Auto-title". If you click on that button, it will attempt to pull in the name of the document for you. So, the above URL will then look something like this: How do I create an online assignment? - Instructure Community - 950.
- Yet another way to create a link to content is to grab the URL from the browser's address bar when you are on the page. Let's say you're looking at this page in your browser: How do I publish a course? - Instructure Community - 1185. At the top of my web browser, I highlighted the entire URL in the address bar, used the keyboard combination Ctrl + C (CMD + C on a Mac) to copy the URL, and then used the keyboard combination Ctrl + V (CMD + V on a Mac) to paste it into a posting here in the Community. The nice thing about this method (which differs from my first bulleted item above) is that it shows the page name right away. You wouldn't have to click on the "A" to "Auto-title" like you did in the other method. Oh, and by the way, this also should work for websites that aren't about Canvas.
By displaying hyperlinks in your postings like this (so they provide the title of the page rather than showing a URL), this will be easier for our friends who use screen readers. Screen readers will read URLs letter by letter... "h t t p colon slash slash community dot canvas l m s...", and this isn't very accessible for those that have visual impairments.
Broken Links 😞
This brings us to a topic that has frustrated people forever: encountering broken links. Ugh! You may have come across a broken link or two while browsing around the Instructure Community website. I know I have, and it's annoying when it happens, right? There are a few reasons I can think of why you're encountering broken links:
- The link is still referring back to the old Community website. The Instructure Community website runs on a platform called Khoros. Prior to Khoros, the Community website's backbone was a product called Jive. Around August 2020, the Community team at Instructure made the transition to Khoros, and that is the platform they still use to this day. With this being said, there may still be a rogue link floating around there somewhere that didn't migrate properly. You might get an error screen similar to "Page Not Found" or "404 Error". In cases where you come across an error screen like this, you might be able to still find the link. Hover your mouse over the Community link that isn't working correctly. If the link was to content in the Community, you might be able to identify what the title of the content was by looking at the URL. If you can identify what the title of the content might have been, use some of those words in the "Search the Community" text box at the top of any page within the Community. You just might be able to re-locate the document in that way.
- The link no longer exists due to modifications made by Instructure Community Managers who oversee this website. For example, back in May 2024, I had responded to someone with a link to a guide on how students can get help with Canvas. (See Solved: Re: Canvas/Firefox 125.0.3 - Instructure Community - 602653.) However, that link no longer works because Instructure Community mangers have consolidated two links ("How do I get help with Canvas as a student?" and "How do I get help with Canvas as an instructor?") into one combined Guide, ...since the instructions were quite similar for both roles.
Sometimes a link might take you to a message that the page was archived. If this is the case, Community Managers might be able to recover that page for you if you really need to see the information on the page.
Another possible way to see older posts is to use the Wayback Machine. While I've not used this site a ton myself, you might be able to find an older post via this method.
Making Suggestions for Guides
Did you know that you can provide feedback and suggestions on existing documentation for any product here in the Community? And, did you know that your feedback goes directly to the Documentation Team for their review? Let's take a look at an example. Let's say you wanted to make a suggestion for clarification purposes about the guide: . At the very bottom of this guide, you'll find a blue "Leave Feedback" button. When you click on this button, a form will display on your screen for you to fill out. Choose the kind of feedback that you want to leave with the Documentation Team, and then describe what you'd like to see changed and/or updated. This works for all product Guides here in the Community, and it's a great way to let the Documentation Team know that something needs their attention. You can read more about this at: .
I hope that some or all of this information has been helpful to you! If you have any of your own tips & tricks you'd like to share with others, please feel free to post them below.
