Taxonomy Management

December 22, 2022

Today is a big day for us as we unveil some pretty exciting details regarding our Taxonomy Management module. We’ve been teasing this module for months, and we know it will be a game changer for health sciences education and professional programs that want to understand where, when, and how they teach and assess their curriculum—and, just as importantly, understand how their learners perform.

Other platforms have tried to accomplish this, but they come up short for various reasons, such as not capturing data granularly enough, being too rigid in the data structures they expect, not capturing assessment data accurately enough, etc. We understand these reasons well, as we both helped develop a previous application that tried hard to accomplish this but wasn’t quite able to due to a variety of limitations, and we worked with many institutions that had cycled through different platforms trying to achieve this. Most had to rely on external systems to report the data accurately, filter out the data they desperately needed, and then visualize it in a meaningful way.

That is why today is such a big day for us! We finally get to share some key details that we know will get some conversations started so we can show you more. So let’s dive into some significant highlights we can share today:

Flexibility at its finest

We named this the Taxonomy Module because it can support any curriculum, list, framework, inventory, etc., you can throw at it. Over many years of embedded experience, we’ve encountered several different frameworks that we had to try to wedge into whatever system we had—most of which only allowed some basic structures or required some serious developer intervention to make it work. We’d love to chat with you about the taxonomies you need to map, track, and report on and show you how VidaNovaVLE™ will work for you!

Build your own business rules

As part of this flexibility, we understand that institutions have specific rules they want to apply when building and mapping their curricular structure of taxonomies in a virtual learning environment. That is why VidaNovaVLE™ allows you to define which taxonomy groups can have relationships with other groups, including the expected parent and child relationships and equivalencies. Additional rules are also considered, such as which taxonomy groups should be available to tag where and whether or not your learners should see them.

What are equivalencies?

Equivalencies allow you to create linkages between nodes across your taxonomy groups which then facilitates reporting on like or equal taxonomy nodes. Many institutions have this requirement, yet, we are unaware of any platform that allows for this in any meaningful way. As just one example, this feature allows us to support mapping other taxonomies to an institution’s curricular structure to report on those taxonomies when needed, otherwise hiding them within the platform.

Visualize your entire curricular structure

We understand that some institutions have very complex curriculum structures. We also know that it is nearly impossible to build and understand a complex curriculum by simply viewing a listing of its data points. That is why we have developed an intuitive concept map or canvas that allows users to visually create their structure by clicking on the nodes they wish to connect via parent, child, or equivalency relationships. In addition, you can set these relationships by simply finding as you type and selecting the node you wish to connect to another. All of this while VidaNovaVLE™ validates the relationships based on your institution’s business rules.

Colour code your taxonomy groups

With lots of data comes the issue of trying to organize it in a meaningful way. When adding taxonomy groups to VidaNovaVLE™, you can identify the colour you want to use to visually identify and track that group and its nodes within our concept map.

Mini-map navigation

Speaking of lots of data, simply having a concept map that allows you to build and visualize a complex curricular structure wasn’t enough for us! Therefore, we have included a mini-map that enables you to pan around the canvas by clicking within the mini-map to make navigation to a specific area of a large structure easier.

Zoom in and zoom out

A large and complex concept map can be tricky to understand without being able to zoom out to get a bird’s eye view or being able to zoom in and drill down to see specific relationships. Our map allows you to do just that!

Search and locate

In addition to facilitating ease of use and navigation via our mini-map and zoom functionality, our concept map allows you to search and locate (automatically focus on) the node you wish to find to see its mapped relationships and additional metadata.

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The Taxonomy Management module is just the beginning for us and our plans for helping institutions weave their curricular structures and the taxonomies they need to track throughout their content in VidaNovaVLE™. Once you’ve added your taxonomy groups and their nodes and mapped them to one another as required within VidaNovaVLE™, you can begin tagging content with them. We’ll talk more about this next week! Until then, be sure to reach out so we can show you more of what our Taxonomy Management module can do.

We certainly feel as though our Taxonomy Management module would make the perfect gift for any institution this holiday season! We hope you enjoyed reading about it and are as excited about everything you’ll be able to do with the extensive functionality of this revolutionary module as we are!

Happy Holidays to you and yours from our family at Fenix Alma Solutions Inc.!