What are topics?

In Totara Engage users can assign any public resources or playlists to topics. Topics, along with hashtags, have been introduced to improve the findability of informal learning content within Totara Engage. All accessible learning content in Engage, such as resources and playlists must have at least one topic assigned.

Choosing your set of topics, and keeping the number of topics manageable, will require careful consideration. Consider how your users think about learning content and which topics will make it easiest for users to find learning that interests them.

Topics differ from hashtags in that they are intended to be a small, broad set of tags, controlled by the Site Administrator. There should be enough topics to comprehensively cover your site's content, but not so many that browsing and selecting from the list of topics becomes difficult. Hashtags provide far more granularity as they can be created by most users and there is no limit to how many there can be. Think of topics as formal tags and hashtags as informal tags.

As a user you can click on a topic to find more related resources, playlists and workspaces. For example, a user viewing a resource could click on one of the topics to find other resources about the same subject matter. Topics are also taken into consideration in the recommendations engine.

Next steps

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