onCourse Tagging

Tag Preferences

OnCourse Tagging: Categories and Subcategories

Tags can be created and added by navigating to “File” -> “Preferences” -> “Tags”. This will bring up a list of Tag groups. Tags are flexible ways for you to categorise your data and organise the navigation of your website.

You can create a Tag group which may contain any number of arbitrary tags, choose to which pieces of information such as Courses, Classes, Students ect, that you wish to apply it to, whether it’s mandatory for all records to have a tag, and if you want to limit each record to only one tag from within this tag group.

The main tag group, used to drive your website and in the export of courses and classes for print production, is the subject tag group. You can create the subjects that are appropriate for your college, and any sub categories needed. You can decide if tagging is mandatory or optional, and if courses can have more than one tag. Giving courses multiple tags mean they can be listed in multiple place on your website. For example, an MYOB course could be tagged with both ‘Accounting’ and ‘Computers’.

This screenshot shows the Tag group called “Subjects”. You can add any number of tags within this group by clicking the plus sign. To add a subcategory tag, click on the category and then select the plus sign.

See how tagging works on your web site.

A flexible way to add classification and structure to your data.

Did you ever want to a program to classify information in a way that was specific to your business, but found that involved expensive modifications to the software? Not so with onCourse – you can structure your courses and classes in a way that suits your college. Like to organise and work with classes by term or semester? No problem. Want to classify classes by region or subject area? Easy. Need to separate tutors into those currently working for your college, those proposing new programs that haven’t run yet and those held in reserve in case a regular staff member is absent? Can do. We call it tagging. You call it running your college and interacting with your business critical data in the most efficient way possible.

Introduced in ish onCourse 0.7 Preview, the “tagging” concept for courses, classes, web pages and other content allows you to build rich ways to navigate through your data. You may wish to group all courses as part of a specific promotion and have that grouping display as a list on your web site. Or you may wish to have a purely internal classification of areas of responsibility for classes. Think of this like categories and subcategories which extend as many levels as you want and with much more flexibility, not just for the web site but for your internal use as well.

Some Possibilities

The scenario

OnCourse Tagging: Year and Term

Your college produces a quarterly publication that contains all scheduled programs for that term. When your staff are working with classes and enrolments, they are usually working within the current term open for enrolment.

The solution

Tag classes by year and term.

How?

1. In onCourse, select file, preferences, tags
2. Add a new tag group
3. Create a name such as “Year and Term”
4. Decide what your tag will be applied to. In this case, we will select Classes and because we want every class to be assigned a year and term (but only one), select both mandatory and limit to one tag
5. Click on the plus sign to add a tag. The first tag we create will be the current year. Name the tag 2007 (the name and short name can be the same)
6. Click on the 2007 that has now appeared in the list and click the plus sign again. This will allow you to add sub tags to 2007 – the terms.
7. Create each of the Terms you wish to refer to. e.g. Term 1, Term 2, Term 3, Term 4. Ensure each time you wish to add a sub tag you select the parent tag (2007) before selecting to add the new tag. If you make a mistake, you can select the minus sign to remove the tag.
8. Save your tags. You are now ready to assign them to classes.

The scenario

Creating tutor type tags

You manage a lot of casual, sessional and contract staff that provide a range of classes for your college. Keeping them organised in to types of staff would make it easier to contact them at appropriate times.

The solution

Create a range of tutor tags that you can use to run searches on, then sms or email them as needed.

How?

1. In onCourse, select file, preferences, tags
2. Add a new tag group
3. Create a name such as “Tutor Type”
4. These tags will apply to tutors. Not every tutor will fit in to one of these tag groups, and some may fit in to more than one, so we will keep the remaining options (mandatory and limit to one tag) empty
5. Click on the plus sign to add a tag. Some tag types may be VET Tutor, ELLN Tutor, Contract Tutor, General Program Tutor, Pending Tutor
6. You can add descriptions to each tag type so your fellow staff members know what the tag means.
7. You may wish to create sub categories within some tutor types
8. Save your tags. You are now ready to assign them to tutors.

To assign and use your tags

1. Open the Tutor window and a tutor record
2. By selecting the dog tag image, begin attaching the tags to the tutor that are applicable. For example, a tutor may be a VET Tutor, specifically a Business Services Tutor and also a Contract Tutor.
3. Use your tags! Don’t waste time setting these up if they don’t mean anything for you. With the above tutor and tag example, you may query all VET Tutors to send them a message about an upcomming professional development activity, all Business Services Tutors to forward through a training package update, or all contract tutors to remind them to remit their final invoices before June 30. Whatever makes your life easier – that’s what tags are for!

Tagging and Untagging more than one record at once

Bulk tagging One of the features that was requested was a means to manage tags in bulk, we’ve included this feature now in version 1.0.

Assuming that you’ve already created some tags, highlight the records that you’d like to tag and right click the tag on the left. This should give you the option to either add the tag to the highlighted records or remove the tag from the highlighted records.

More information about the bulk email and SMS functionality in onCourse.