Is there a way to search through all courses for which you are an instructor to find content?

Ginger.B.711

For example, if I have multiple courses in Brightspace, and I wanted to search through all of them to see if I used a specific YouTube video or a link to an external website, etc., in any of them, is there a way to do that?

Jeffrey.M.844

Hello @Ginger.B.711

At present, there is no global content search functionality available in Brightspace.

Now, depending on what content experience you are using, you may be able to perform a topic name search at the course level. At present, only the Classic Content Experience has the ability to search content topic names (at the course level). If you are using the New Content Experience, you may attempt to workaround this by using browser search, which will search only the text rendered on the page at the time you perform the search.

That said, to cast your vote for global content search as a feature, I would invite you to vote for this idea in the Product Ideas Exchange (PIE). PIE is designed for users like you to send direct feedback to our Product Development organization and has the following advantages:

1. It allows you to receive direct updates on each request you submit
2. It allows other community members to vote on ideas
3. It allows other community members to contribute to and collaborate on each idea
4. It ensures ideas that have the greatest impact on our clients and end users receive consideration for inclusion in future releases.

Finally, another alternative, although this would require access to Data Hub, is to pull the content-related data sets to get a picture for what content objects live in your courses. Typically Data Hub is access-restricted to Administrators, so if you do not have access you could reach out to your Organization's Brightspace administrators to download / join the appropriate data sets for this exercise. If you are an administrator, you will likely be looking at using/joining the following data sets:

• Content Objects (To get content object details)
• Course Offering Enrollments (To qualify which courses the targeted user is enrolled in)
• Users (To identify the user id for the targeted user)

I hope that helps!

Jeffrey

Learning Administration Manager

Christina.T.727

@Ginger.B.711 - did you find any third party tool by any chance that could do this?
We've been wanting functionality like this for both our learners and instructors.

So far we are trialed Atomic Search which had some good features: https://integrationhub.brightspace.com/details/atomic-search

But wanted to trial other tools before we make a decision on what would work best for us. But nothing else on the integration hub, obviously did a global search functionality.

Thought it was worth asking to see if you found anything as coming up to a year ago that you posed this question

Ginger.B.711

@Christina.T.727 - No, we haven't tried anything like that. I'll have to look into it.

James.M.211

> @Ginger.B.711 said:
> For example, if I have multiple courses in Brightspace, and I wanted to search through all of them to see if I used a specific YouTube video or a link to an external website, etc., in any of them, is there a way to do that?

What about something more modest: can I do a global search of all the discussions within a single course for a keyword?

Soowook.K.3615

The titles of all the folder and items can be searched for this way: each course's Content > top left menu > the gear icon for View Reports > The report shows all the folders and items on one page > Ctrl + F (Windows) Command + F (Mac) > search with keywords.

Even though this does not cover the embedded content of each item, it's an alternative to the classic content experience's "Search Topics" bar.

Soowook.K.3615

Good news. The search topics box is now available in the new content experience according to the December release.