Anytime you curate online resources over a period of time, broken links are a frustrating reality.  They seem to crop up only when it’s most inconvenient to research and repair them.  Checking all of the links in your course, however important, can be incredibly time-consuming and mind-numbing.

Canvas has created a link validation tool that flags problematic links for you so you can fix them before they become a problem for you and your students.

Instructions

Prefer text? Read How do I validate links in a course?

Things to Watch For

In addition to broken links, this tool will also flag links to other Canvas sites that students may not have access to.  You will most commonly see this message when you have copied content from one Canvas site to another.  Fortunately, Canvas automatically converts most imported links to navigate within the new site, but there are times when links still point back to the original course site. Check all of these links and update them to your current course site.

You may also receive notifications for resources that students have access to through the Library’s databases. Since these are not publicly available, Canvas may flag them as inaccessible. Verify for yourself that the resources are available with UMassD credentials, and then you can safely disregard the warning message.