Finding your way around

For students

Most of Alexandria happens inside one course. Three screens sit above that level: the course home you land on, the full list of your courses, and a chat that can reach every course at once. This article covers those, and the error screen you see when a course cannot be opened.

Everything here is visible to every signed-in user. Nothing on these screens depends on your role.

The course home

Opening Alexandria without a course in the link takes you here. A question box sits in the middle, and your courses run along the bottom.

The Alexandria course home. A large question box under the heading Library of Alexandria, with a History button beneath it, and a row of course cards along the bottom: Heat Transfer (ME-3120), Thermodynamics (ME-2140) and Test (DSFSDF), each marked Verified and each offering library, chat and practice links, followed by a dashed card reading See all your courses — The course home. Each card links straight to that course's library, chat or practice.

Each card carries the course name, its code, and three links that skip a step: library opens the materials, chat opens the course chat, practice opens the questions.

The row shows only the courses that fit on screen, ordered by teaching period. Courses in the period running now come first, then those starting later, then courses with no period set, then courses whose period has ended. If you are enrolled in more courses than fit, the rest are one click away on the full list.

The full course list

The See all your courses card opens the complete list.

The All Courses page listing Heat Transfer (ME-3120), Thermodynamics (ME-2140) and Fluid Mechanics (ME-2100) as rows, each marked Verified, with a search field labelled Search courses by name or code in the top right — The full course list, with a search field that matches on course name and course code.

The search field filters as you type and matches both the name and the course code, so ME-3120 finds the course as reliably as Heat Transfer does.

Where your institution defines teaching periods, the list breaks into sections headed Current, Upcoming, No period and Past. Where it does not, every course falls into one section and the headings are left out, which is what the list above shows.

Use the course home when you are heading into one of the two or three courses you work in daily. Use the full list when you are looking for a course you have not opened in a while, particularly one from a period that has ended.

Asking across all your courses

Typing a question into the box on the course home opens a chat that is not tied to a single course. Answers are drawn from the materials of every course you have access to, and each conversation is kept in a sidebar on the left.

The cross-course chat. A sidebar on the left lists a New Chat button above earlier conversations including Understanding the Courant Number and Sample chat for Thermodynamics, while the main pane shows the answer to What is the Courant number, marked as generated from the course material with 15 sources and containing a rendered CFL formula and numbered citation chips — Cross-course chat. The sidebar keeps every earlier conversation; the answer cites the material it came from.

New Chat starts a fresh conversation. Selecting an earlier one reopens it in full, including its citations, so a conversation is worth returning to rather than repeating. The History button under the question box on the course home leads to the same place.

Which chat to use:

Situation	Where to ask
The question belongs to one course	The chat tab inside that course
You are not sure which course covers it	This cross-course chat
You want to compare how two courses treat a topic	This cross-course chat

Scoping a question with @, the answering modes, and the citation chips work the same way here as they do inside a course. They are described in Ask your course a question.

When a course cannot be opened

A link to a course you cannot reach produces this screen rather than an empty course.

The Course not found screen: a magnifying glass icon above the heading Course not found, the message This course doesn't exist in your institution, or it may have been removed, and a Back to courses button — Course not found. The course is absent from your institution, not merely hidden from you.

It has three ordinary causes: the link points at a course belonging to a different institution, the course has since been removed, or the link was truncated when it was copied. Back to courses returns you to the course home.

This is a different message from “this course is not set up yet”, which means the course does exist and your educator has not yet connected it. That one resolves itself once the educator finishes the setup.