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.
7. When finished, close the new tab to return to your original Echo360 window and the search results.

Each result type is listed below, showing the icon that accompanies each result time, and details about the other information provided in the search result list.

1. • 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 matches to an interactive media class, clicking the result opens the media in the New Player in a new tab, just like when you click 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.
     

   • Transcript matches look and act like Video matches, opening the class at the matching location, and with the transcript panel open, showing the same matching location.
     The Transcript matches also LOOK identical to Video match results, with the play icon, the time stamp, and the match in context as shown below. Once in the class, you can still use the Search box at the top of the Transcript panel to search the transcript for any additional instances of your search term.
     

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 identical results for a single class. 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 clicking either entry will take you to the classroom (open in a new tab) to the identified time-stamp location of the result. 

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 or an approximation. For example, searching for "electricity" will return entries for "electricity" and "electric" and other very similar entries. Selecting a transcript result will take you to the classroom and to the location in the media where the entry resides. In addition, the transcript panel will be open and showing the location of the search result.

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.