Content Tagging - Product Release Notes

The Product and Engineering Teams at OpenCraft and Axim are thrilled to announce the release of Content Tagging! 

What is Content Tagging?

With the Content Tagging feature, course authors and instructional designers are able to add tags to their course content. This includes the ability to tag full courses; individual blocks like problems and videos; and segments of the course like units, subsections or sections.

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Tags are organized into structured taxonomies, or controlled vocabularies. The platform supports the use of any third-party taxonomy, which means that course administrators and subject matter experts are free to use any taxonomies they wish. Administrators and SMEs can also create their own taxonomies. 

Taxonomies are uploaded to the platform as CSV or JSON files, and permissions can be set at the organization or instance level. Once applied, course authors can add tags from the taxonomy to their course content.

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Value Proposition and Example use cases

Content tagging supports a diverse range of use cases for instructional designers who wish to do subject matter alignment.

For example, instructional designers can align courses - or certain content within a course - to skills or competencies that are required for achieving a certification. A course about Financial Reporting may contain certain units or lessons that teach the particular skills required for obtaining a third-party certification, such as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) certificate. By tagging course content with the requisite skills tags from a standardized Financial Reporting taxonomy, relevant course content is aligned with the requirements needed for a certification. By successfully completing those units or lessons, learners can demonstrate achievement of required learning outcomes.

Content tagging also improves content authoring and content reuse workflows.

For example, content authors may wish to find all of the videos in their courses that cover a certain subject, like factoring binomial equations. When those videos are tagged for “factoring binomial equations”, authors can conduct a search using those terms and easily find the content. Coupled with the copy/paste feature, this makes it easy and straight-forward for authors to find content and reuse it in other courses, which reduces authoring time and increases efficiency and velocity.

New functionality:

• Tag drawer that lets authors add and delete tags to courses and to content within courses

• Taxonomy dashboard that lets any users see which taxonomies and tags are supported within their organization

• Taxonomy import workflow that lets administrators upload any third-party taxonomy, as well as update it

• Taxonomy Templates for creating or converting taxonomies for ingestion

• Permissions Management Tools that lets administrators enable or disable taxonomies at the organization or instance level

• Tag Export function that lets course authors export a list all the tags used in a course

Notes on scope:

Tags are only visible on the Studio side, by users who have staff access to courses. Tags are not visible to learners.

Tags must be part of a structured taxonomy or a controlled vocabulary. Free tagging is not yet available.

Details:

1.

Tag drawer

The tag drawer is the place to view tags that have already been added to content, add new tags, and delete tags.

The tag drawer can be accessed from a couple of places. For adding tags to courses, the tag drawer is accessed from the top of the course outline page, under “manage tags”.

From any content block, the tag drawer can be accessed from the three-dot menu, under “manage tags”.

Once tags have been added, the tag drawer can also be accessed from the tag icon, which appears on the content block containing tags.

Once the tag drawer is open, if there are already tags added, they will display in a view-only state.

Users can add tags, either by conducting a keyword search for a tag, or by scrolling through all the tags in a taxonomy and clicking the box by the tags they wish to add.

Multi-level taxonomies may contain parent and children tags, where children tags are nested underneath the parent tag. When a child tag is selected, its parent tag is automatically added as well. When a parent tag is selected, its children tags are not automatically added.

Users can delete tags by clicking on the “x” next to tags in the drawer.

In multi-level taxonomies, deleting a child tag will automatically delete its parent tag.

2.

Taxonomy Dashboard

The Taxonomy Dashboard is the home for viewing and managing all taxonomies that are supported on an instance. Any user can access the Dashboard to view all taxonomies that are enabled for their organization or instance, while administrators are reserved the right to set permissions on taxonomies, import and export taxonomies, and update taxonomies.

The Dashboard is accessed via Studio Home.

Once on the Dashboard, any user may view the Taxonomy Page for any given taxonomy. This is a good way for course teams to become familiar with all the tags that are available for them to add to their courses, by exploring the list of tags associated with each taxonomy.

3.

Taxonomy Import and Updates

The platform supports the use of any third-party taxonomy, which means that course administrators and subject matter experts are free to use any taxonomies they wish. For example, taxonomies may come from academic, governmental or professional organizations like the Open Skills Network, the World Economic Forum Work Skills Initiative, the Commons Core Standards, or the Mathematical Association of America, or from proprietary sources like Lightcast Skills.

Administrators and SMEs can also create their own taxonomies. 

Administrators can upload taxonomies to the platform as CSV or JSON files, via the Taxonomy Dashboard.

The platform supports both flat and hierarchical taxonomies. Flat taxonomies are the simplest types of taxonomies, consisting of simple lists of tags. For example, a Taxonomy for tagging the “difficulty” of problems might contain tags like these:

Taxonomy: Problem Difficulty

Hierarchical taxonomies are more complex, consisting of one or more levels of hierarchical, or nested, tags. These tags are often called Parent Tags, Children Tags, Grandchildren Tags, etc. For example, a hierarchical taxonomy of locations might contain tags like these:

Taxonomy: Cities

Regardless of whether a taxonomy is pulled from a third-party source or created from scratch, it must be formatted prior to upload in a CSV or JSON file. For in-depth instructions on how to create and format taxonomies, see How-to: Build a taxonomy using a template and How-to: Create a flat taxonomy.

Taxonomies are dynamic and often require updates. For example, the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy is updated on a weekly or biweekly basis. Administrators can perform updates on taxonomies by exporting a taxonomy from the platform via a CSV or JSON file, applying the updates locally, and re-importing the file. A change log will display for verification. Upon verification, the updates will be applied across the instance or organization. In other words, if a tag is replaced, changed or deleted, those updates will automatically apply to any piece of content where the tag had been applied.

4.

Taxonomy templates

The Taxonomy Dashboard comes with pre-built taxonomy templates to make it easier for administrators to format third-party taxonomies. For in-depth instructions on how to create and format taxonomies, see How-to: Build a taxonomy using a template.

5.

Permissions Management Tools

Administrators have the ability to set taxonomy permissions via the Taxonomy Dashboard.

Taxonomies can be enabled or disabled for one organization, multiple organizations, or all organizations. For single-org instances, enabling can be accomplished by checking “Assign to all orgs”. Once enabled, a taxonomy and all its tags are visible in all courses.

Currently, there is not the ability to enable or disable a taxonomy at the individual course level.

6.

Tag Export

Course staff can export a CSV file that reports on which tags have been added to which parts of the course. This is helpful for tracking all tags on a course in a single view. The export includes the full course outline and all of the tags that are added to each part of the course.

What’s coming in future releases?

What’s on the horizon for Sumac and beyond?

• Adding tags to Library content

• Ability to search, filter and sort Library content by tags

• Ability to bulk add tags to content

• Reports and analytics on content by tags

• In-platform taxonomy editing functionality