New: Globally Accessible Outlines

Nov 15, 2021

At the time of writing, published course outlines on the outline.uwaterloo.ca platform are accessible by any logged in UW user. However, it has come up in several discussions that some units would like to make their course outlines globally accessible, allowing access without authentication for consumption by incoming or potential students.

We are happy to announce that we are officially adding this functionality to the software!

New URL Format

As part of this update, we’re changing how URLs look for course outlines. We previously used a very simple id-based url, (/view/1). While this is nice and compact, it also allows for web scraping, meaning an individual could programmatically walk through numbers 1-9999999 searching for course outlines.

While this isn’t a concern for our authenticated users, for which there are only thousands, this could easily become an issue opening the server to the whole world. For this reason it is generally standard practice to use short text-based URLs:

Moving forward, Outline URLs will look like this: Outline.uwaterloo.ca/view/nt5gl2

To maintain backwards compatibility, the number-based URLs will continue to work, but only for authenticated users. This means any links you’ve already provided to your students in the past will continue to work as intended.

How to Enable Global Accessibility (Editor / Admin)

Once you’ve published your course outline, head on over to the Info/Settings tab. From here we’ve added a new setting which enables global access:

Open

That’s it! The URL for your course outline can now be shared with anybody, whether they have a UW account or not!

Sharing Global Outlines

One of the reasons this feature was added was to enable faculties or departments to publically post links to course outlines, as many groups on campus have done this in the past.

At this time outline will not be providing unauthenticated browsing tools. So, unlike UW students who can search for course outlines, global outlines can only be accessed via direct link!

To make it slightly easier for faculties to get these links, the Administrator page now has some simple tools for sharing URLs to course outlines:

Copyable Links Tab

If you need to copy a whole bunch of links to paste onto a website or into a Word document, admins can use the Show Copyable Links button above the list of courses:

Open

The list that gets presented can easly be selected and manually copy/pasted into most documents. As seen above it’s also possible to show only globally accessible outlines.

Copy Single URL

If, as an administrator you need to provide a direct link to a course outline to someone else, we’ve provided a quick way to get those URLs:

You can then paste this URL into your Teams chat or email to provide a direct link to the content.

These changes should be live by the end of the week!