As of Thursday afternoon, you have created 215 tags on 37 programs, 150 courses, and 163 course sections. Thank you for all of your hard work.
We reviewed and edited all of the tags, removing, editing or combining tags. We can provide a spreadsheet detailing the changes we made if you would like. We edited tags that were:
- Too Narrow: Tags that were too keyed to particular course content to reasonably be shared across three or more courses in any semester.
- Too Broad: Tags that were so broad that they would either collect a substantial number of courses in a single program, or too many courses too loosely connected across programs (e.g. "culture").
- Too Vague: Tags that were subject to too many competing interpretations of their meanings. This issue often overlaps with "too broad" (again, e.g., "culture").
- A Synonym: Tags that were very close in meaning with an already established term (and/or a better one) and courses under that term. We merged these into one tag.
- About Advising and Business: Tags being used to advise on requirements or conduct business, rather than for intellectual discovery.
- Too Many: In some cases, you gave us too much of a good thing. Please resist the temptation to tag an item with everything that could possibly be relevant. If you apply the "well, it touches on this so why not?" approach to tagging, your tag list will be overloaded, the results will be misleading and the result will not help you or your students. A good rule of thumb is that at least 50% of the course should be relevant to the course. This means that most survey courses should only be tagged First Course.
We also noticed that you spent a lot of time tagging course sections with information that should have gone on courses. If you tag a course, all of that course's sections inherit those tags. When a new semester's course sections come in from Banner, those sections will also inherit those tags. You should only tag course sections when their content is unique for that semester.
You sometimes added tags that were very, very specific. If you are looking at a course in isolation and thinking of all of its important aspects, it may feel right to tag it with the name of a specific city or of a specific Babylonian ruler. However, the more specific a tag is, the less likely it will appear anywhere else. "Cities" is a useful tag. "Washington, D.C." is not.
We will revise our tagging instructions on the help site to include more tips about when and how to tag.
Again, thank you for all of your hard work.
October 29, 2015
