03-Finding Courses
Last updated by neal.legler 4 years agoFinding Courses in Canvas
The basic steps of searching for a course are intuitive.
If you see multiple results for the same course, click on the one that has a teacher and students.
(See the section on crosslisting to learn why there are often many results with no students.)
(See the section on crosslisting to learn why there are often many results with no students.)
What to search for: Course naming conventions
Academic courses in Canvas are all named following the same pattern.
[TERM] [YEAR] [SUBJ]-[####]-[SEC]
Where [SEC] means the three character code for the section, and the [TERM] is always Spring, Summer, or Fall.
Also pay special attention to where there are spaces and where there are hyphens (-). The search feature cares about these things, even if sane people don’t.
Summer-2021 ENGR-2030 won’t pull up anything in the search. Why? Because of the naughty little hyphen between Summer and 2021 . That’s supposed to be a space.
Summer 2021 ENGR 2030 won’t pull up anything. Why? Because there’s supposed to be a hyphen between ENGR and 2030 . Once you get past the term and year and on to the actual course bit, hyphens become the order of the day.
Summer 2021 ENGR-2030 is just right. The spaces and hyphens are in the right places. That will get results.
But where’s the section? Well, you don’t need to type everything in a search term to start to get matches. Half the time you won’t know what section you are looking for. But if you do, throw on another hyphen and type in the section as well. Voila!
Summer 2021 ENGR-2030-MO1
Ahh! That will do the trick.
Filtering Results
You don’t have to type the term just right or sort through empty courses that match if you use the filtering options.
The dropdown term filter lets you display only courses from that term, and the checkbox to hide courses without students lets you hide the courses that are completely empty of enrollments, which odds are you don’t care about. (This checkbox turns out to be pretty useful because of crosslisting , noted in a later tutorial.)
Searching by Teacher
Sometimes you don’t necessarily know the course you are looking for, but you know the teacher you are working with and the term you are in. (Sometimes this is the case because the teacher can’t remember the number of the course, or just figures you already know it!)
To do this, choose “Teacher” from the Search by dropdown menu. The one tricky part with searching by teacher is that full name searches don’t usually work so well. This is because Canvas keeps users’ middle names, which you probably won’t know and therefore won’t be able to include for an exact match. Just pick the most unique part of the teacher’s name and type that into the search box. If the last name is something like “Smith,” but the first name is “Bartholemew” go for the first name. If the first name is “John” and the last name is “Malachowicz,” go for the last name. If the name is “John Smith,” good luck.
It’s usually helpful to filter by term when you search by teacher.
Searching by SIS ID
If, through an unusual stroke of fortune, you happen to know the crosslist code or CRN that is part of the SIS ID (see the Banner Integration tutorial), you can type that into the search box and sort by term.
Going directly to the course with the Canvas Course ID
Sometimes you can ask the teacher you are talking to for the Canvas course ID that appears in the course URL. This comes right after https://usu.instructure.com/courses/ in the address.
If you know the Canvas course ID, type https://usu.instructure.com/courses/[COURSE_ID] in the browser address bar and you’ll go directly to the right course.
