Course creators needed an efficient way to apply tags to courses as well as the various parts of a course—like sections and individual blocks such as problems and videos—so that they are easy to find and reuse across courses. Enter Content Tagging – a flexible tagging feature supporting content search, reuse, and taxonomy management to make course authoring easy and scalable.
The Open edX project is run by Axim Collaborative. They bring together the right partners to ensure that the Open edX Platform remains the best open source learning technology. Axim selected Open edX partner OpenCraft to improve the Open edX Platform to allow learners, faculty, and administrators to better find, organize, and link to content by component or course.
For example, with the new capability, content owners and instructional designers can search for tags that match their requirements and apply them to their course content. Administrators gain better control over taxonomies, either their own or of third-parties like Open Skills Network or Lightcast Skills, that help them categorize and sort content for better retrieval and understanding. For learners, it means quickly finding the right course to meet their needs.
Adding tags to content is only the start of the Open edX Platform’s Content Tagging Strategy that ultimately will enable authors to build adaptive experiences customized to individual learner profiles and let learners create self-directed learning pathways.
The new tagging system is flexible, allowing users to tag all levels of an Open edX course—from the course as a whole, to its sections, subsections, units, and individual components. The tagging functionality comes with a search feature. For example, say a course developer needs to build a new course and doesn’t know if there might be existing content that she can reuse. With the Open edX platform’s content tagging capability, she can search for tags that match her course requirements. In the example below, she finds four modules that had been tagged by their creators and adds them to her course. In this way, course authors can quickly build new courses while leveraging the most relevant content.
Powerful search functionality enables content authors to find items within a course or library using either free-text search or tag-based filtering. Users can refine their search results by content type to make it easier to find a specific section, subsection, unit, or component within a course.
Besides the tagging tool, this effort also includes a taxonomy management system which provides a list of the taxonomies that are available to the user. It also allows authors to import third-party taxonomies like the Open Skills Management Network, or use custom taxonomies created by the organization. Once imported, the user can manage the taxonomy in a number of ways, including editing and updating the taxonomy. Changes will automatically be applied across any course content that has been tagged using the affected taxonomy.
The new capabilities include a taxonomy editor and tagging drawer that primarily uses pre-built components from the Paragon Design System. A design system is a set of reusable UI elements that deliver visual consistency. By using pre-made components, we ensure the design stays in line with the broader Open edX ecosystem. It also saves development time, prioritizes accessibility, responsiveness, and scalability, and allows us to benefit from ongoing updates from the community.
The Content Tagging feature became available to the Open edX community with the release of Redwood in June 2024. It has continued to grow and improve as the Content Libraries project. We’re thrilled to see course authors actively using the feature and excited to support its continued development.
