filtering Courses by Audiences

We have a similar need with users, to have them designate what areas they need training in: Ex, Developer or Architect. For our smaller partners, one person may meet both needs; however, same as on courses, the additional fields don’t allow for multi-selection. 

We’re grouping courses for a specific audience and product into learning plans, and then advertise those learning plans to users and make them available directly from product landing pages.

Regarding search, we are having mixed results. The issue we observe, is that the search engine is prioritizing Learning Objects and not courses. So, it’s quite difficult to precisely control what will show as top results for a given keyword.

We’re getting the best outcomes by following this path:

For a given keyword, for example “ProductXYZ Administration”:

1. we remove that keyword from all tags in all modules (can be quickly done by adding the keyword to the tags black list in advanced settings, and then removing it.
2. For the course(s) which we want to be displayed at the top of the search results, we add this tag to only the first learning object of that course
3. We often rename that first learning object to make the name more meaningful so users will know what the whole course is about (so instead of “Course introduction”, we’d make it “Introduction to product XYZ for Administrators”)

In your scenario, you’ll however need to also make sure that keywords will not contain each other (as searching for Engineer will also include results with Engineer and Engineering Lead).

I know it’s not a perfect solution.

Skills  from Docebo.

Try using Skills to set this up. I am new to the skills stuff but based on your information I believe you can utilize Skills to organize content.

https://university.docebo.com/learn/course/352/managing-docebo-skills

You may also try to use channels to place content as well or possibly in how you have course catalogs setup.

Very interested to follow this thread as we’re trying to do exactly the same thing for our customers. They want to be able to search for courses based on ‘level’ which is very similar to your ‘audience’ eg junior accountant, manager, partner etc.

We’ve encountered the same issue ie some courses would be applicable for both a junior account and a manager.

We’ve also found that the ‘Filters’ area has become a bit congested making it less useful. This is because there are default filters which are superfluous to our use case eg. Language and Content Partners but they cannot be turned off and they take precedence in the listing over our Additional Fields.

I would like to use Skills rather than our current “role-based” method, though Skills will only be fully useful when I can enter skills that are more tightly aligned with the medical industry or I can add my own skills. I think Skill has a lot to offer.

Curious to know if anyone came up with a solution or a workaround for this?

Like @TrishAH , our customers are specialists in their field (tax & accounting) so the Skills option is too generic to work for us.

But we do need to provide an indication of what ‘level’ the content is suited to ie Foundation, Intermediate or Advanced. This can be done with a Course Additional Field but as with @Chelsy Koshy ‘s use case, we need to allow for selection of more than one of these options as content could be suitable for all 3 levels.

Upon further reflection, you can add an Additional Field in the Course Management, which becomes a field inside the course which becomes a Filter item in the menu.

You can populate the field via API instead of manually if you choose to do so, as I am planning to do the same while cleaning up Associated Products listing.

Hi @TrishAH 

Thanks but as per the original post, “this is possible by adding course additional field, but we cannot choose or enter multiple audiences in the course additional field. What is the best way/method to add multiple audiences in courses, that will help a learner to filter or search the courses by audiences?”

The use of Course ‘Additional Fields’ creates a 1:1 relationship so a course can only be graded Foundation OR Intermediate OR Advanced. We have sessions like Tax Updates for example which are suitable for all 3 levels so we need an ‘AND’ relationship.

Curious about this - 
If you are able to create groups for those specific audiences, why not then create course catalogs that are permissioned to those groups, making it easier for the learner to find what they are looking for? 
example: 
Engineers have a course catalog
Engineer Leads can see that one + their own course catalog
It organizes the courses, creates less courses per catalog (paralyzation from too many choices is a real problem) helps to keep those who are maintaining the courses better organized, and also answers the questions around if you have enough content created for each audience. 

I would imagine that by adding the courses to catalogs based on audience, you’d also have some unique reporting options open up to you as well. 

Just offering a route that doesn’t include using Skills. 

Hi @TaviaRitter 

Thanks for the suggestion but I don’t think we could make that work in our situation.

We have over 500 courses which are organised into catalogues based on subject matter eg income tax, GST, trusts, wills & estates. Our learners are external customers and we don’t necessarily know whether they are lawyers, accoutants, financial planners etc.

Some courses are suitable for lawyers AND accountants. Some are at an ‘advanced’ level but others are appropriate for ‘Foundation’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Advanced’. Since it’s the subject matter that determines the level, we’re looking for a way to ‘grade’ the content so that learners can choose to see only material that is ‘intermediate’ for example.

I may have misunderstood what you’re saying but I can’t think of an elegant way to accommodate all these permutations without duplicating content into a lot of catalogues which could become very confusing.

Hi All

This has been added to the ideas portal so if you’ve contributed to this thread and would like to this progressed then please go and vote here

I have stumbled across this thread as it is very similar to a challenge we are facing. We have an added challenge in that the “filters” we are looking to create apply not just to courses, but informal assets as well that are housed in Channels. 

I see that this was added to the ideas portal, but of course that has been temporary closed so I have no idea what the status is. Does anyone on this thread know? And also would you have any insight into how we might address the aforementioned challenge with assets/channels? I posted it in Docebo Community but no responses so far.