Utilising tags and additional tag groups

Helping users navigate your content

Clarifying the general usage of tags for the website

The following applies to the “Subjects” tag group.

When tagging courses, for example, it is better to tag courses with the most specific tag available. i.e., the outermost tag or leaf tag within the tree.

For example, suppose you had a “Sports” tag (within your “subjects” tag group) and beneath “Sports” you added various sub-tags such as “Cricket”, “Football”, “Swimming”, and so on. You might have various sports courses, such as “Batting master class with Mr Cricket”, “Endurance swimming with Grant Hacket”, and so on. You would tag these two courses with “Cricket” and “Swimming” respectively. Only the cricket courses will be displayed on the website if the user clicks on the cricket link, however both courses will be found within “Sports” for more general browsing.

The above is all you need to do for general browsing on the website (i.e., tagging courses and ticking as web enabled for both the courses and relevant classes).

More specific tagging

Website tagged by term

You may find it desirable to provide your prospective students, for example, with additional navigation options. For example, you might like to create a page that lists terms by year.

For this example, instead of tagging courses, you’d be tagging classes with the relevant term tag as follows

• go to File > preferences > Tags in onCourse
• click the add button
• type in name such as “Term Dates” with a short name of “terms” and tick the option to apply tags to “Classes” with Limit to one tag also ticked. You could make this mandatory if you like. This means that this tag group can only be applied to classes and each class can only be tagged with one term tag only.
• add year tags within this group such as 2008, 2009 as well as however many relevant named term tags beneath each year. This might look like the following: Term Dates — 2008 ——Term 1 ——Term 2 ——Term 3 ——Term 4 — 2009 ——Term 1 ——Term 2 ——Term 3 ——Term 4

• tag all classes in onCourse with their relevant term tag.
• create a web page called “Terms Dates” with the following content: {tags name:“terms” type:“class”}

This creates a navigation system similar to the home page but finding classes (still grouped by course, in this example) that are tagged with the linked term tag (or child thereof). You can naturally add any other usual rich content you’d like on that page as well.

This feature is very flexible as it allows you to create as many categorised pages like this as you like.