Canvas Transition: Do All Your Links Work in Your Course?

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You’ve brought your course over to Canvas from Moodle, and you’ve finished preparing it for the upcoming semester. In previous semesters, you’ve either had to check each link in your course manually to ensure it works or wait until a student finds a broken link. But you don’t have to do that anymore with Canvas.

Canvas’ built-in link validation feature will search the content in your course for invalid or unreachable links and images. The link validator has some limitations and can turn up results that Canvas can’t view but students still can.

For example, in our online courses, we embed each syllabus into the course using Google Drive. The files are set so anyone who has the link and is logged into their Cedarville Google account can view them. Canvas does not have Cedarville Google login permissions, so the link validator will note those as “broken.” You’ll see in the following image that the Course Syllabus is noted as having “Non-existent content referenced in this resource.” Some embedded videos from Ensemble (Cedarville’s media repository) may also show up as non-existent content. If you click the resource name, you can confirm that it is embedded in the course and available.

Ready to try this out for yourself? Check out Canvas’ “How do I validate links in a course?” page.

What now?

If you have questions about anything you read or suggestions for topics to be covered, leave a comment below. If you need help using one of these features in your course, contact Canvas Support (937-766-7905).

Note: edited September 11, 2023, to remove the reference to Canvas Fellows.

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