Adapt Learning Community: Ideas for Glossary Extension

Hi All -

Just wanted to put this question across the community to get your views on the features that you would like to have in the Glossary Extension apart from the one's mentioned below, there are few in discussions will keep adding as we finalize -

Glossary will be part of the resources drawer
Glossary can be added in course JSON
Terms will be searchable using a active search box
Terms will be alphabetically sorted
All the terms will be listed and the description will appear in an accordion

Thanks!

Regards,

Aniket

Hi Aniket,

Looking good. As per the Skype chat on Friday - I'd like to have the ability to accompany an entry with an associated image. This could be a small thumbnail which once selected opened up a larger image (perhaps stored in resources). This would be really useful addition for Instructional Designers.

We're typically had an A-Z filter but I guess we've got this feature already with the active search field and given the size of the drawer any simplification of glossary UI will help.

Can I confirm 'Glossary can be added in course JSON' we're talking about the ability to hyperlink to a given glossary entry from anywhere within the course.

Thanks,
Paul

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What I would like to see is, if we take an A-Z centric approach, a way to open and close each letter category within the drawer. Otherwise we may end up with a long list of entries in the drawer which wouldn't be very user friendly.

Paul - I agree, it's definitely useful to link to where an entry is in a course, but a term can appear multiple times, so is it worth bringing up a list of locations (i.e. 20 words of text in situ) or simplifying it and just putting in the data in the first instance?

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Hi Nicola,

I know what you mean, we always used to use an A-Z list to filter but now, if you enter A in the search field that would immediately remove all other words beginning with the letters B-Z - essentially achieving the same goal. I'm just a bit worried about the space a full A_Z list would take and how usable it would be on mobile.

With regards to multiple entries, yep, I agree it can be a problem when you get multiple entries. I normally follow the same rule you stated. Link to it in the first instance and again if its required in an assessment.

Thanks,

Paul

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Do you think it would occur to the user to use the search feature in this way? I'm not so sure. We could always put it in the Search description though.

In terms of A-Z, I agree let's not use it unless it's suitable for mobile users - (side thought - what if the letters were laid out not in lines, but in a grid (e.g. four letters per row)? Selecting a letter would bring up the Glossary items as well as a button to close the list.)

Rather than restricting ourselves to A-Z, maybe the key is flexible glossary categorisation (e.g. a client may ask for a 'Leadership' category) and A-Z sorting of entries within it...?

What are your thoughts?

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Hi Nicola,

A few other considerations/opinions.

Cheers,
Paul

"Do you think it would occur to the user to use the search feature in this way? I'm not so sure. We could always put it in the Search description though"

Yes, I think so. It’s not the only way of navigating either, all the entries would be visible for you to scan through. I guess we could also have an A-Z list that looked like an accordion with each letter being clickable which when selected opened up to reveal all the entries for that letter. Might be a bit OTT though given how many entries most courses will contain (probably 20 or 30 tops in your everyday course).

"In terms of A-Z, I agree let's not use it unless it's suitable for mobile users - (side thought - what if the letters were laid out not in lines, but in a grid (e.g. four letters per row)? Selecting a letter would bring up the Glossary items as well as a button to close the list.)"

I think less is more on mobile. I’ve got an A-Z list on my phones contacts and it’s so small it’s practically unusable. Maybe that's just me though and my podgy fingers.

"Rather than restricting ourselves to A-Z, maybe the key is flexible glossary categorisation (e.g. a client may ask for a 'Leadership' category) and A-Z sorting of entries within it...?"

I wonder whether we might tie that into the search feature we've built and will be making available. We could assign meta data to glossary entries so when you type in your keyword and get a list of related destinations and associated glossary entries (and maybe even resources as well).

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Hi Paul -

Yes we can confirm that Glossary can be added in course JSON. We have additionally, added a check box, "Search within Description" which will also search for words within the description.

For A-Z option I think it would be of no use at this point as adding that will not help in multi-lingual courses. We would need to discuss of what approach we can use for it. Example: If we can get all the unique first letters from the terms and show them in the list.

Let me know your thoughts on the same.

GIT Entry for testing - https://github.com/adaptlearning/adapt-contrib-glossary/tree/version-0.0.1

Thanks!

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You can have an alphabetical list and have it work for most multi-lingual courses. You just need to be able to specify the 'grouping letter' as well as the terms & definitions associated with it.

Although some alphabets can get pretty lengthy (as an example, Hungarian has 44 letters), you can easily work around this by displaying only those letters that actually have terms associated with them - I've never yet seen a course where the glossary had a term for every single letter.

The only languages an alphabetical grouping won't work for are those which are logographic (or otherwise non-alphabetic) - Chinese, for example. I'm not really sure what you'd do in those instances as I have never had occasion to localise a course containing a glossary into a language like Chinese. I suppose having the option to switch off the alphabetical grouping would solve this.

FYI I've frequently seen glossaries that have included an audio version of the term and/or definition - in Europe it's mainly as a pronunciation guide but in the US it's because everything in e-learning has to have audio associated in it ;-) Anyway, seems like this would be an easy & sensible option to add.