How Effective eLearning Content Tagging Empowers Users

Tag, you’re it: Why you need to tag your content

Think of content tagging like trying to adopt a dog. Start by deciding what breed you want. A spaniel? A terrier? A St. Bernard? Pug? Retriever? Rottweiler? Great Dane?

What colour would you prefer? Age? What kind of personality? Does it need to be good with kids? High-energy? Gender?

Presumably, as you prowl for your perfect pooch, you’ll have some must-have qualities in mind. However, if you can’t answer any of the questions listed above to filter out candidates according to your preferences you’re basically taking a shot in the dark.

eLearning content needs effective tagging

It might seem like apples and oranges, but this selection process has strong parallels to tagging your eLearning content. Whenever we upload or share a new course in a learning management system (LMS), we have the opportunity to tag the content – to apply relevant terms of description to the learning objects.

Take for example a course on health and safety training. Ideally, in the eLearning platform, the course is tagged with what we call learning object metadata (LOM) that helps users search for and find the content – or even be pointed to the content – quickly and easily. The health and safety learning object could be tagged with terms such as, “compliance”, “health and safety”, “mandatory training”, “occupational health and safety”, and so on, depending on the jurisdiction and its associated compliance requirements. With the right tags (and the right LMS), the content is effortlessly searchable, linked to associated content, and primed for personalization to individual users.

However, too often eLearning content is tagged poorly or sloppily or – worse yet – not tagged at all. While this doesn’t make the content unuseable, it does mean learners could miss out on valuable content. As well, without tagging, content sharing falls squarely on the LMS administrator who may wind up sending individual users a link to the content in question to make sure they get what they need. Bottom line; u tagged content is consumed less – resulting in learning gaps and confusion.

On the other hand, properly tagged content gets learners closer to the courses they need in order to onboard quickly, keep pace with training requirements, and even benefit from non-mandatory courses that can better equip them to perform in their roles.

Something else to consider is the role of AI in content serving. Well tagged content is step 1 to harnessing the future potential of AI and machine learning in the eLearning space. We recently explored the emergence of the “Netflix approach” to eLearning and how smart AI can essentially recommend content to users based on their habits and interests, thereby enabling them to discover content they might not have come across otherwise.

Think of eLearning content like a librarian

So, let’s say you’re behind on tagging content. You have tons of eLearning content in your LMS backend and you didn’t tag it properly and you want to fix that. You also want to properly tag content moving forward. The good news? It can be done! The bad news? It’s going to take some work and commitment.

Essentially, you need a librarian. This could be an existing or external L&D resource, but depending on the amount of existing and incoming content you have, it might have to be a dedicated resource. This individual would be charged with reviewing all existing content; creating a tagging strategy; eliminating irrelevant tags; applying new, pertinent tags; and testing the new model of categorization to ensure it is applicable based on a variety of use cases. Think back to the dewey decimal system; at the end of the day, in any proper LOM initiative, we’re essentially just building a library. That’s it.

Docebo’s robust tagging capabilities puts content at your learners’ fingertips. Try Docebo free for 14 days, today, to explore what’s possible!