SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

2784345 - Course Library Best Practices - Learning Administration

Symptom

  • Learning Administration – Course Library
  • This KBA will outline course library best practices.
  • Libraries control which Items and Curricula Users can self-assign, and limit the Scheduled Offerings in which Users may self-register.

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.

Environment

SAP SuccessFactors Learning

Resolution

Course Content Library

SAP SuccessFactors Learning Structure - Items

Items…any learning activity, training requirement or other entity which needs to be assigned, tracked and reported with SuccessFactors Learning

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Accessing other Learning Content

Culture of Learning and Sharing -

  •  Learning is integrated into your daily work life
  •  User-centric
  •  Doesn’t rely on top-down training

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                                            How do your employees find what learning is available?                                        

Libraries

  • Libraries control which Items and Curricula Users can self-assign, and limit the Scheduled Offerings in which Users may self-register
  • Library access is transparent to users, one or many libraries may be assigned to a user, but they cannot determine this via the user interface
  • Employees access to the training Items in the Library • How many libraries are in place across the whole organization?
  • Do you require to provide access to certain content to a limited audience? • If you allow User Generated content in the future (Collections, Quick Guides) would you want that content to reside in a different library?

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LMS Admin > Learning > Library

Library Search Options

  • Whether a user searches for a specific keyword, phrase, or just selects to browse all courses, he/she will eventually find themselves on the Library Search page.
  • The page displays all search results (Items, Curricula, Programs, Quick Guides, etc.) that are found based on the search in question
  • Filters available on the left-hand side of the screen will allow a user to whittle down the list based on certain criteria (Library, Subject Area, Delivery Method, etc.)
  • For organizations with SAP Jam integrated with the LMS, search results for content stored in Jam will be displayed under the ‘Social Learning’ tab (a great feature for promoting informal learning within your organization and bringing it into the LMS)
  • There are a lot of additional options to end users to allow them more ways to find what they are looking for more efficiently – keyword search, sort, categories, etc.
  • To keep users oriented and give them information as they need it, the display is built with “cards”
  • These cards surface the most critical information and actions for the users' current context and hide information and does not apply to the current context

Keyword Search - Keyword searching instead of exact phase results in more applicable search results.

Library search algorithms - Looks for key words in both the item’s course title and description, not actual online content.

Ordering of search results - Results are displayed by relevancy of search terms instead of alphabetical order, but can be changed to display by Tier, Title or Price instead.

Boolean logic search - Use of AND and OR in search strings require “”

Languages - Ability to search across 2 languages (primary/secondary) – this can be of particular importance to global organizations with users fluent in multiple languages.

Search Phrase - keywords and exact phrase:

  • Capitalization is ignored
  • Punctuation is ignored
  • Numbers are searched as both numbers and words

Stop Words - common words ignored by searches

Examples: a, is, the, that, this, do, no, nor, not, has, have

Symbols -

  • “Exact phrase” – changes stop words to search words, prioritize phrases within longer phrases
  • *wildcard* - finds words with letters before or after the word

Libraries Offerings

Item classifications determine how the item is used, and are automatically determined by SuccessFactors when the item is created and configured.

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Category Offerings – Item Classification

Item classifications determine how the item is used, and are automatically determined by SuccessFactors when the item is created and configured.  There are five classifications in the system:

  • Instructor-Led now called Scheduled Only
  • Online only
  • Blended now called Scheduled and Online
  • Other (i.e., physical goods)
  • External- Course (NOTE - only used for Open Content Network items

Which item classifications that appear can be configured by the customer in the LMS Admin configuration file. This configuration specifies the categories that are enabled and thereby searchable in the library search.

  • catalogSearchCategories[Curricula]=true librarySearchCategories[External]= true
  • catalogSearchCategories[OnlineCourses]=true librarySearchCategories[OtherLearning]= true
  • catalogSearchCategories[Program]=true librarySearchCategories[QuickGuide]=true
  • catalogSearchCategories[Collection]= true

LMS Admin > System Admin > Configuration > System Configuration > Library

Search Filters – Secondary Category Classifications

  • You set filters to determine what other ways to narrow the search are available in in the Library
  • This configuration allows existing library search filters to be enabled or disabled. All others cannot be configured 
    • catalogSearchFilters[DeliveryMethod]=true
    • catalogSearchFilters[Location]= true
    • catalogSearchFilters[Source]= true
    • catalogSearchFilters[SubjectArea]=true
    • catalogSearchFilters[Rating]= true

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  •  This configuration property specifies whether to display the Mobile Ready indicator. showMobileReadinessIndicators= true
  •  Use the Library Search Type Ahead option.  This configuration is used to enable/disable the library search type ahead feature. enableLibrarySearchTypeAhead=true

Keyword Search

Keyword searching instead of exact phase results in more applicable search results.

Library search algorithms - Looks for key words in both the item’s course title and description, not actual online content.

Ordering of search results – Results are displayed by relevancy of search terms instead of alphabetical order, but can be changed to display by Tier, Title or Price instead.

Boolean logic search - Use of AND and OR in search strings require “”

Languages - Ability to search across 2 languages (primary/secondary) – this can be of particular importance to global organizations with users fluent in multiple languages.

 Search Phrase - keywords and exact phrase

  • Capitalization is ignored
  • Punctuation is ignored
  • Numbers are searched as both numbers and words

Stop Words - common words ignored by searches

Examples: a, is, the, that, this, do, no, nor, not, has, have

Symbols -

  •  “Exact phrase” – changes stop words to search words, prioritize phrases within longer phrases
  •  *wildcard* - finds words with letters before or after the word

Library 3.0 – Search

Library 3.0 - Search

Library 3.0 – Browse Topics

  •  Course library topics are set into subject areas that users can browse.
  •  When users want to browse the catalog to find the courses that interest them, they need a hierarchy of topics to describe the course.
  •  Learning administrators can create topic areas and configure the them to brand it and make it familiar to users.
  •  You can associate competencies with subject areas so that users can filter by subject area when they search for competencies. For additional information regarding this functionality, please check our latest version of SAP Help page:

See Also

Creating Learning Libraries

Keywords

KBA , LOD-SF-LMS-CAT , Catalog , LOD-SF-LMS , Learning Management System , How To

Product

SAP SuccessFactors Learning all versions