Using Tags

In Amplifire, tags are an umbrella term. They encompass:

• Learning objectives
• Topics
• Common mistakes
• Audience

Learning Objectives

To begin structuring your course, you will need to determine your instructional goal and define the learning objectives that support and enable your learners to reach that goal. Learning objectives can be defined as a set of relevant ​competencies that enables improvement​:

• Which behaviors do you want to change in your learning population? Which behaviors do you want to encourage?
• What do you want your learners to be able to do as a result of the learning you've provided. What must they know to do that?
• What is the gap (actual performance vs. expected performance)?​ Why is there a gap?​

The answers to these questions will enable you to develop learning objectives that will be the guiding principles upon which you build your course.

You can add learning objectives to your Amplifire course in a couple of ways:

• Using the project planning wizard and including learning objectives as part of that process

• Adding learning objectives at the course level by:
  1. Clicking on the three-dot menu from the course page
  2. Selecting Tags 
  3. Creating or selecting learning objectives to add to the course

• Adding learning objectives at the question level by:
  1. Clicking on the three-dot menu from the question page
  2. Selecting Tags 
  3. Selecting Add Tag +
  4. Creating or selecting learning objectives to add to the course

The final step you must take no matter how you add learning objectives to your course is to add them to your questions. To do this, from the Tags side panel in the question, click on each of the learning objectives (and other tags) you want to add to your question. They will turn blue and show up in the tags list in the second panel.

Topics

Topics are used to group similar questions together for reporting purposes, so they should align with and support your learning objectives. Topics allow managers to identify a learner’s or department’s areas of expertise or misinformation. 

Key areas for focus include:

• Analyzing learning objectives and deciding how you can break them down into topics
• Designing and prioritizing the learning (what's in and what's out, what needs to be emphasized)
• Filling knowledge gaps (One of Amplifire’s primary goals is to fix misinformation—which is confidently held, but incorrect, knowledge. This misinformation leads to common mistakes.) 

The ability to "slice" the data you have collected on your courses and learners based on the topics present in your courses makes assigning topics to questions of great importance. Slicing could mean that for a single question, you might want to include two to three topics because questions might span different competencies.

For example, if you are training call center employees on conflict resolution, topics could include conflict resolution (obviously), but also customer service, choosing the right words, or even when to ask for help. The topics you include should reflect the data you'd like to see once your learners have completed the course.

Just like learning objectives, you can add topics from:

• The course planning wizard
• The course page's three-dot menu
• The question's three-dot menu

Common Mistakes

We all make mistakes. But when we make those mistakes because we have what Amplifire calls commonly held misinformation or CHM, that's when we make those mistakes with confidence— and potentially cause great harm.

Common mistakes are an important consideration when you draft questions in Amplifire because it is a learning tool, not an assessment tool. So the question's distractors (the incorrect answers) should target the common mistakes (CHM) you see in practice.

For example, in the question below, pulled from Amplifire's author training course, the correct answer is selected. The two distractors are questions trainers frequently receive. In fact, a third of learners selected them as the correct answer. 

Consider common mistakes as you draft your questions, tagging them in the questions to keep you on track with your learning goals.

Audience 

Your course should have a specific audience. Speaking to everyone—while it seems the most inclusive option—will leave your course unfocused and less useful than it could have been. For example, consider the following progression:

• Medical professionals
  • Nurses
    • Nurses assigned to the emergency department

Addressing medical professionals may be tempting since anyone could engage with it and still learn, right?

Yes, that's true. That's why you could have a primary audience—nurses in the ED—and a possible secondary audience of either other nurses, nurses and providers, or all medical professionals. However, your course should only address nurses in the ED.

Spend some time prior to writing considering how specific you can be with your audience to make your course as impactful as it can be.