All about the Discover Page

What is the discover page?

The Discover page is the place where you can explore new learning content that is curated by the learning professionals within your organization. The content is curated based on the mission of the organization.

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What are the different types of carousel available to users?

  • Featured Provider: Any open, private or premium content providers that are explicitly featured on your Discover page. For Example Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, TED, etc.
  • Custom Carousels: Carousels created by your admin, customized to your organization’s objectives and enabled from the Admin Console to show on your Discover page. For Example 'Being EdCaster, EdCast Originals, All Channels and Higher Education
  • Subject Matter Experts: These are individuals with the assigned role of an SME. These are users that you can follow to get content published by these SMEs
  • Promoted Content: Any smartcard, pathway, journey, channel that is ‘promoted’ by the admin from the Admin Console to show on your Discover page. For Example Public Speaking 101, Architecting with Google Cloud Platform
  • Trending Content: Any content is considered ‘Trending’ based on the number of activities/actions performed by the user such as likes, comments, views, marked as completed and bookmarks
  • Courses: Any courses that are published from the EdCast Corporate Academy MOOC feature

How to configure the discover page?

Admins can customize their Discover page from the Discover Carousels configuration settings, which consists of enabling Custom Carousels with new Labels, Pathways, Journeys, Trending content, Videos, Channels, Courses and EdCast instances.

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The layout of the Discover custom carousel during creation of the carousel, using one of the available layouts. To customize an existing custom carousel navigate to Admin > Content> Content Carousel> Edit Carousel.

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What are the different user roles?

General User: This is a member role or a basic access given to all using the the platform. 

SME/Influencer: People who know about their subject areas and who can share that knowledge with others. 

Channel Collaborator and Curator:  Channel collaborators have permission to add content to the channel whereas channel curators manage the channel, can update all channel settings and can add/remove any content within the channel

Administrator and Sub-Administrator: An admin is a default role with full administrative capabilities in the platform whereas sub-admin can only access limited admin consoles depending on the permission provided to them.

How to search effectively on EdCast?

Unified Search
EdCast supports unified search with one search index and entitlements. In simple terms, EdCast finds the most relevant content for you based on all the content that has been aggregated on EdCast limited by your access rights.

Search manifests throughout the product in different ways and central to the search experience is the Header Search.

In addition, there are several specialized search functions in various contexts

  • Header Search aka Unified Search: The master search that searches across all content types
  • People Search: Allows for the search of people by name or skill in the More Menu
  • Channel Search: Allows for the search of channels by name in the More Menu
  • Group Search: Allows for the search of Groups by name in the More Menu
  • Channel content search : Available within each channel allows you to search for content within a channel
  • Featured provider search: Allows you to search for content within a featured provider
  • Provider Search: Allows you to search all the content provided by a specific provider.

What are the different types of Searches on the EdCast Platform?
Header Search
This is the main content search within EdCast and allows you to search for any word or phrase and then filter the results intuitively. After doing a header search, 12 cards are returned with a set of filters, which appear on the left that allow the user to select results to view:

  • Content Type: To filter on the most frequently used content types on EdCast. Note: Only the available options will be presented.
    • Course
    • Article
    • Insight
    • Video
    • Pathway
    • Journey
    • Poll
    • Stream
  • Content Source: The sources or the content providers integrated with EdCast.
  • Organizations: To filter based on the following
    • Users
    • Channels
    • Groups
  • Options: To filter based on the following
    • Language: The language of the content depends on the content available. The Header Search results page acts differently than every other content page for displaying content. Search will show all content for all languages, regardless of your configured language settings for the platform. This allows you to find content in a language that might not be your configured language.
    • Level: The skill level of the material as determined by the author (Optional. Contact EdCast to enable)
    • Date Range: When was the card created (Optional. Contact EdCast to enable)
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Channel Search
Allows you to search content within a channel. Any search performed using the channel search is filterable by the following categories:

  • Type
  • Content Source
  • Organization
  • Options
    Search logic is the same as in the header search with the exception of how content in different languages is displayed, The channels page (as with all other pages other than the header search results page) will display content in your selected language and an option is displayed at the bottom of the page to show all content regardless of language.

People Search
Allows you to search the people on EdCast and provides a way to filter the results by the custom fields published on EdCast. There are two, related people search options available in admin settings:

  1. Enable/Disable header search.

Admin > Team > Disable User Search will remove people from the general search results (Off = people will be in search results. On = People will be excluded)

  1. Disable People Search from the More menu.

Admin > Settings > Configuration > Profile > People toggle and save. (On enables the menu item. Off disables it)

Admin Search
Enables those with access to the Admin console to search for the settings they seek. It is limited to individual settings and will not find full pages such as “create channel”.

Provider Search
Allows you to search all the content provided by a specific provider.

Advanced Understanding of Search

  • Labels: These are more highly weighted than card title or text body. Only Exact Match is supported for labels - stemming and spell check are not considered. Labels are not case sensitive. A search for the exact label should result in cards with that label being returned first in the results.

  • Card Titles: These are more highly weighted than text body. A search for a specific string will return cards with that string in the Title first, and cards with that or similar text in the body second.

  • Boosting of content types: Admin can request EdCast configure a specific content type to be returned higher in search results. For example, if the organization prefers video’s, video content can be returned preferentially in search results.

  • Boosting of specific sources: Admin can request EdCast configure a source to be returned higher in search results. This can be useful for returning Internal content above generic subscription content for example.

  • Phrases: Phrases typed into search will return exact matches first and similar results second. For example, a search for “the quick brown fox” will return a card with that exact phrase in the Body first, and a card with partial match “brown” and “fox” for example, second.

  • Special Characters: Characters such as & (ampersand) and % (percent) are treated the same as whitespace in a search phrases and have no other special meaning in searches. For example, a search for “surf&turf” will match the exact phrase “surf&turf”, as well as “surf turf”, "surf & Turf” and even “surf % turf” in content as high priority such that it will show early in search results as a phrase match. A search for just “surf” may also match that content, but as it is not a full phrase match, the priority will likely be lower.

  • Spell check: The system will suggest alternative searches if limited search results are found.
    Searches that match cards that are within pathways, both the stand alone card and the Pathway that contains it will be returned in the search results.

  • Stemming: This is supported for the English language. The system will match on derivatives of words searched by ignoring pluralization, tenses, ‘ing’s, etc. For example, a search for ‘Leader’ will match on “leadership”, “Communicate” will match “communication” etc.
    The hidden fields “external ID” and “Course ID” are searchable the same as tags/labels. If the External ID is populated, it can be searched.

  • Natural Language Search: This is not currently supported. A search for “how do I climb a tree” may not match a card with the tag or phrase “climb a tree” because the phrases are not an exact match. It may be useful to educate users to avoid using filler words such as ‘how’ and ‘why’ in searches.
    Admin can see all content, but search does not necessarily return content results that the Admin user does not have access to - however, if the admin has the direct URL they can view it

  • Searches are all logged as events: Customers subscribing to EdGraph reporting feature can access search reports highlighting popular searches.

What is My Learning Plan?

MLP is used to track and to keep a record of your learning. The purpose is for you (and your managers) to plan a learning journey for a given calendar year and showcase your achievements and progress. The learning plan surfaces all the content that has been assigned to you by quarter and your progress. This MLP is your learning transcript. You can download the transcript from the MLP.


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