Best Practices for Search
This article is useful for any end user who needs to search for syllabi stored in Concourse–administrators, instructors, IT professionals, and students.
Overview
Concourse allows institutions to store syllabi in a variety of organizational approaches. Depending on the choices your institution has made about its Concourse instance, you may need to search for syllabi using different criteria to find the information you need.
Before You Begin
Before you begin searching for syllabi, keep in mind that your institution determines whether you are able to access the search panel. If you are not able to navigate to the search panel by following the directions below, your next step is to reach out to the IT department or Concourse administrator at your institution for assistance.
Please note that if you are able to access the search panel, your search results will list every syllabus in Concourse that matches your search criteria. However, if your group permissions do not allow you to view the syllabus you select, you will receive an error message when you attempt to open that syllabus.
Finally, if you enter your search terms in the Keyword(s) field, your search results will include all syllabi in the system that match any component of your terms. In other words, the keyword search tends to be too broad for most users.
Searching for Syllabi
If you would like to search for syllabi in Concourse, follow these steps:
- Navigate to the search panel. If your Concourse interface doesn’t automatically direct you to the search panel, you can get there by selecting the magnifying glass in the upper-right corner of your Concourse screen.
- In the search panel, select + Advanced to access more criteria for your search.
- You may then enter the course title, subject, course number, instructor, session (term), year, number of credits, or delivery method.
- Select Search.
- On the subsequent page, the syllabi matching your search terms will appear on the right side of the screen under the Results heading.
- You may sort the search results by selecting the preferred sorting criteria in the upper-right corner of the Results pane.
- Once you have located the syllabus you would like to access, select the hyperlinked name of the course (e.g. American Literature I).
Best Practices and Recommendations
To make the most out of your search experience, we recommend the following practices:
- We do not recommend using the quick search function (the search bar next to the magnifying glass in the upper-right corner of the Concourse screen). Quick search is a keyword search, which yields less precise results.
- If you are searching for courses or syllabi to which students can register (live courses), in the search panel, select Non-templates under the Templates drop-down menu.
- If you search by course title, the course title you enter must be exact, without typos. For example, if you search for “Composition,” your system may return results such as “Composition I” and “Composition II.” However, if you search for “English 1301” in the Course Title field, you will not receive any search results even though “English 1301” is the same syllabus as Composition I.
- The more specific criteria you enter, the more precise your search results will be. Try searching for more than one parameter at a time to find the syllabi you need quickly.
Good luck and happy searching! We hope your Concourse experience is positive and that you’re able to find the information you need efficiently.
Related Articles
Opening Concourse in a New Window (Canvas)
This article will be most useful for IT/IS staff and Canvas admins. Overview If your institution uses Canvas LMS and has integrated Concourse via LTI 1.3, you may have noticed an uptick in “ID token: State not found” errors. This error means that the ...Disable and Purge User Accounts
This article will be most useful for Concourse admins. Overview An important part of Concourse maintenance is ensuring that the system can only be accessed by authorized users. We recommend reviewing user accounts, purging unnecessary accounts, and ...Pasting Text from Word into a Syllabus
This article will be most useful for course developers, syllabus editors, and/or instructors who are able to edit syllabi. Overview Syllabus content exists in many different formats. It can be found in course catalogs, in the Student Information ...Linking to External Sites in a Syllabus
This article will be most useful for course developers, syllabus editors, and/or instructors who are able to edit syllabi. Overview It may be necessary to link to external sources when editing a syllabus. For example, you might want to include links ...Multi-Item: Snippets Report
This article will be most useful for academic administrators, instructors, and Concourse admins. Overview The Multi-item: Snippets Report (Snippets) is a feature that allows users to examine multiple categories of syllabus content simultaneously. It ...