It should be possible to link from one topic to another, say for instance where later material is referring to material from earlier in the course.

Said links should be relative within a particular course, so that if I copy the topics from one course to another, the link keeps the student within the course they are enrolled in. Right now the URL for a topic follows a pattern that makes this impossible: For example a topic URL might look like: xxx.myschoolapp.com/app/faculty#topicdetail/303766/89058997/89058997/642830/0/0

First off, this is clearly a "faculty" URL. Using this as an absolute link is probably a bad idea as I would not expect students to be able to access it.

Second, relative links within a topic use the root: xxx.myschoolapp.com/app/ Without the "faculty#topicdetail", the links don't work, which gets me back to the first point.

Third, the first number "303766" and the last three numbers "642830/0/0" appear to be associated with the topic and are stable across sections of the same class, but the second number (which is repeated twice) "89058997" is specific to the section. Thus the same topic in another section would have a different URL like: xxx.myschoolapp.com/app/faculty#topicdetail/303766/89058997/89058997/642830/0/0. This means that even if just chop off everything before the numbers, the relative link location is still tied to a specific section. If I construct the links using one section, won't students in other sections have trouble following them?

Ideally, the URL for a topic should have all section information as part of the root for relative links and the topic specific information after that so that a relative link points to the corresponding topic in the class the user is currently viewing. I.e. if I was constructing the URL for the above sample it would look like: xxx.myschoolapp.com/app/faculty#topicdetail/89058997/89058997/303766/642830/0/0

The root for relative URLs within a topic (actually, the whole class section) would be: xxx.myschoolapp.com/app/faculty#topicdetail/89058997/89058997/

And thus a link to "303766/642830/0/0" would point to the appropriate topic within that section.