Folksonomies – tagging that enables user categorisation of courses

The Open University (OU) OpenLearn sites (Moodle based of course) have many courses organised into OU defined categories. While this logical categorisation (taxonomy) gives the site front page a sensible structure and reflects the origin of course materials from within the OU, it may not help some users – particularly users who have never had any contact with the OU and its faculties before.

An individual user could be interested in subjects spread across many courses in several categories. In fact many users do not browse the site starting from the beginning where the courses are grouped in their categories – they often use Google (and other search engines) to go directly to the course(s) and page(s) where the information they want may be.

So the idea of tagging of courses allows users to create their own taxonomies. Hence the term ‘folksonomies’. While one user could tag their own selection of courses for their own use, the combination of users tagging should show some interesting information as the number of tags for a course, or the number of uses of the same tag starts to accumulate for the community of users.

It would be envisaged that a folksonomies block could display personal and/or community tags on the site front page and on course pages. The usual style of more popular tags appearing more prominently will be used, and these tags will provide navigation to the course(s). There would of course be facilities for adding and editing personal tags for users, and more editing rights for administrators (to remove rude tags, and even to block individual users from tagging if required).

It is also envisaged that this block would use the current core blog tag table to store the tags and a new course_tag_instance table to store the folksonomies tag instances separately from blog tag instances. It may even be possible to tag resources – though that could be a challenge too far for initial implementation.

Request for your level of interest in this idea

The OU’s OpenLearn team are considering this idea, and were wondering whether anyone else in the Moodle community might be interested in this sort of thing, or might have some other thoughts or insights into this type of idea. If you have read this far, then I would be very grateful for any thoughts, comments or feedback of any sort.

Thank you