Whether you are a student or an instructor, you may find your sections filled with useful but difficult-to-find items, especially if you are looking for something specific. The Course Search feature is designed to help you target the information you may need, especially when it comes time to study for a test, or for an instructor to create a quiz around a class discussion.

To access the Course Search

1. Access the Course you need from the Courses page to open the Class List.

   Alternately, if you enter from your LMS/VLE, the Echo360 link in the LMS course may place you directly into the class list.

2. Select the SEARCH tab located on the right side of the course tab options.
   
3. Use the Search text box to enter a term or phrase you want to search all course content for. You must enter text in the search box to return results.
4. Use the filtering drop-down lists, shown below, to narrow your search to specific types of content or to a particular class.
   
5. The results list shows all the items that match your search criteria. The icon on the left of each entry identifies the type of content it is.
   
   
   
6. Click an item from the results list. The item opens in a NEW TAB for viewing. This is so that you can view the result without losing your search results.

   Each result type is shown below along with details about the other information provided in the search result list.

   • For Class Name matches, clicking the result takes you to that classroom, as if you had clicked on the class from the Class List page.
     

     Note that for Interactive Media that has been added to a Class, clicking the result will open launch the New Player, as if you had clicked on the class from the Class List page.

   • For Q&A matches, clicking the result opens the Q&A tab with the item selected so you can see the full discussion context. If the question has a video location or slide referenced, that location/slide number is included under the Q&A icon.
     
   • For Notes matches, clicking the result opens the Study Guide for the class where the note appears. If the note has a video/slide location in the tag, that location is included under the Notes icon.
     
   • For Slide matches, clicking the result opens the classroom with the slide deck showing the slide that matched your search criteria. The matching slide number is included under the Slide icon in the results list.
     
   • For Video matches, clicking the result opens the classroom at the matching location. The video location is included under the Video icon in the results list.

     Note that video matches are actually "closed caption matches" as that is the text available to search a video for a particular location. If the videos in the section do not have closed captions, you will not receive any Video search results.
     

   • For Transcript matches, clicking the result opens the classroom but at the beginning of the video. You can use the Search box at the top of the Transcript panel to search the transcript for the instances of your search term. (Time-stamped transcription results will be provided in a future release of Echo360.)
     
7. When finished, close the new tab to return to your original Echo360 window and the search results.

One thing to note is that if your institution is editing automated transcriptions to apply as Closed Captioning files, and you search across all section content for a term, you are very likely to get multiple results for a single class video. This is because the same term will generate results for both Video (captions) and Transcripts matches.

Below is an example of what you may encounter in this case. If this happens, remember that the closed caption result will take you to the specific location in the video where the term appears/is spoken. The Transcription result will take you to the classroom but not to the specific location (a limitation that will be addressed in a future Echo360 release).

Details on how course search works

The course search is effectively a text search, looking for items in the course that contains whatever text you entered into the search box. You MUST enter text into the search box to return results. Be advised, however, that only the FIRST part of any word is matched against your search results. For example, "you" will find all matches with "you" or "your" etc. A search for "our" will find "our" but not "your".

• For Q&A, Class Names, and Notes, a text search is fairly straightforward. The Results are entries that contain text matching the search word/phrase.
• Presentation PPT-type files often have searchable text but not all of the text in a presentation can be "read". Where the text in a presentation can be identified and matched, the slide containing the matching text is returned. However, images containing text cannot be read and therefore those slides will not be returned. And sometimes it's difficult to know if the text in a slide is part of an image, or was typed onto the slide.
• Presentation PDFs are also sometimes searchable and sometimes not. PDFs are often generated as pictures of text, meaning they cannot be read. However, depending on how the PDF was generated, it may be "readable" by the Echo360 search. This means that the Section Search may match search terms for some PDFs and not for others.
• Video searches are actually searches of Closed Captions; videos themselves don't have text to search. If your class captures and videos do not have closed captions applied, there will be no "video" search results.
• Transcript searches return results for each class where the transcription contains the matching term, however, the specific location of the term in the transcription is not currently returned (this will be addressed in a future release). Selecting a transcript result will take you to the classroom where the associated video resides but not to the specific location; use the transcript search in the classroom to find the location of the term you need.

Finally, the Transcript search will search for individual words but not for phrases in the transcriptions. If you enter "milky way galaxy" in the search box, the transcript results will be for matches to "milky" and "way" and "galaxy" individually. The other content type searches DO search for phrases when entered. This limitation to transcript search will be addressed in a future release of Echo360.