Canvas Update: Canvas Links 

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Canvas is improving how linking works throughout courses. One of these changes that we’ll be talking about has already been implemented, but the other two have yet to be released.  

Course link sidebar displays name of current link 

The first change Canvas has made is already present in your courses. Previously, if you wanted to change a link that you’d already added to the Rich Content Editor, it was faster to just remove the link entirely and create a new link. Now, Canvas has made it simple to replace the link – and it shows the name of whatever you currently have linked in the sidebar.  

To open the sidebar, click the link text, then select “Link options.” Choose a new link in the sidebar and click “Replace” at the bottom right to replace the link.  

Course link sidebar allows creation of items if no items exist 

The next change Canvas has made is releasing on August 30. If you want to add a particular type of link into the RCE but it doesn’t exist yet in your course, Canvas gives you a link to then go and create that item.  

For example, I wanted to add a link to a quiz, but there were no quizzes in my course. I clicked the “Add one!” link in the link sidebar and was taken to the quizzes page. 

I then created a quiz and went back to my initial pages tab in my browser. After collapsing and opening the “quizzes” tab in the sidebar, I was able to select the Quiz 1 I had just created and link it into the page.  

Please note that this feature is only available if there is none of a particular link type in the entire course. If you’re building a page in a course and want to link an uncreated assignment into the page while other assignments exist in the course, you won’t have this kind of shortcut. You’d have to manually open the Assignments page, create the assignment, return to your page – and then save and reopen the page to add in that link.  

Changing page titles automatically updates links  

While all of these updates are great, this is the update I’m most excited for. On September 16, Canvas will automatically update all links in a course when a page title is changed.  

Previously, if you updated the name of a page, you’d then have to go to every place you had linked it in a course to update the URL so it would continue to work. Now, Canvas takes care of updating that URL for you, redirecting from the old URL to the new. However, Canvas does not update the text of the link, so if that needs to be changed, you would still need to go to each place it is linked and update that. 

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