Your goal is to create a humanized homepage that is welcoming, supportive and focused.
And you know what? There's one thing that will derail all of your best efforts. Links
that don't work. When you create links in your Canvas course you can set them up to be flexible
or non-flexible. Flexible links don't break when you copy a course over from term to term.
Non-flexible links break. You want to be sure that you are creating flexible links in your course and
that comes down to how you set those links up. To create flexible links, you need to use the
Links tool in the Canvas rich content editor. I'm going to show you how to do that. When you create
links in your course by copying and pasting the link to a page or an assignment in your course,
you are creating a non-flexible link that's going to have to be updated every term. Not such a good
idea. So here I am in my Canvas course on my humanized homepage. This is the template that I
imported from Canvas Comments. I replaced it with my own banner. I customized the color of the text
to match that banner. I embedded a video and I also customized some of the words down here ,
included a link that says liquid syllabus. So here's what I want to show you. This is one of
the links that was here to start and if I click there to test it out let's see what happens.
It's taking me out to a page but it's a page that I don't have in my course. So that
is not set up as a flexible link. Let me go back and show you how to fix that. First of all,
we want to go to the top right and click on edit and once we're in edit mode
I'm going to click on that link and select Remove link. So now it's just text. Okay? It's no longer
linked and now i'm going to highlight the whole thing and use the Links tool in the rich content
editor toolbar and it's the one that looks like a link. So i'm going to click there
and choose Course links. That's going to open up a slider panel over here on the right and now you
get to choose where in your course you want to link this to. I want it to go to my orientation
or my getting started module so i'm going to click on Modules and choose Module 0 getting started.
So now I'm going to save this by clicking Save and give it a test again.
And you'll see now it goes out to the getting started module which
is where where I want my students to go. Let me go back to that page again.
Now you can add links to external sites on your page, as well. So if we want to do that we can
use the external links feature and since it's not actually linking to a password-protected Canvas
course, those links will roll over okay. So let me show you what i mean by that. Over here I have
the link to my liquid syllabus so I can copy that url -- it's an external site nobody needs to sign
in to get to it, it's public, right? So I copy that link. I go back to my page. Select edit.
And here I want to remove link,
highlight the words, click on the links tool. Now I'm going to choose external links
because it's a link external from our course, paste that link in ,and click done. Now that
one's going to work okay again because it's not a link that's behind a password protected page.
That's really important to remember. Every course is password protected so when you have students in
a spring course for example and they're clicking on a link that's trying to take them back to
your fall course, well that's not a course they have access to. So they're going to hit a wall.
So that is something very important to know about links when you're setting them up in your course
and when you have your homepage template imported be sure you click on all the links
and ensure that they're going right where you want your students to be taken.