Smartsearch doesn't work for students if pages or modules not enabled in LH menu

[sharon_kitching]

Some of our Canvas courses hide both the pages & modules in the left-hand menu. I've noticed that Smart Search will not return results if these are hidden (both for student view & for 'real' students). Still works for teachers. Is this a bug or a feature? 

[sharon_kitching]

Works if Pages is showing, and not Modules & vice versa. So only needs one. 

[gncrum]

Great catch! I was doing some testing myself and noticed it was not working for students. This is definitely a bug. In most scenarios, instructors hide the Pages link as this is more a repository where pages are stored, as opposed to an area where students would look in for information. So the scenario where pages is hidden and modules are showing is common....

-Greg

[jperkins]

This was an intentional change to limit access to content accessible to users through navigating a course. Customer feedback indicated that teachers didn't want pages to be displayed to students that weren't navigable via the UI. Now, that being said, we can certainly look at still surfacing results if both pages and modules are hidden (otherwise it makes the search tool useless). Thanks for sharing your feedback!

[gncrum]

Thanks for the reply!

I would push back and say that the pages navigation link takes you to an alphabetical list of pages. This is not very helpful for students; its like  creating website with no navigation structure, but is simply an alphabetical list of pages with no context. What we usually tell our instructors to do is hide the pages link allt ogether as it is more of a repository, and then present the pages in context, by linking them to another page or place them in a module. These are the pages that will need to be searched as they may be linked to a page within a page or within a module and buried within the course.

What would make more sense would be to have the Smart Search tool only search *published* pages for students and all pages for anyone with a role above the student role. Or perhaps only search pages that are linked to other pages, or modules.

Thanks!

Greg