Skills Generation

Skills Generation

One of the metadata fields that Generator can generate for your content is ‘skills’. Generator can create a flat list of words or phrases that define the set of skills that would be improved through taking the course. In many ways, the ‘skills’ metadata functions and behaves just as the other metadata fields. The generated skills for a piece of content can be retrieved by the GET /api/v1/content/{content_id}/versions/{version}/fields/SKILLS endpoint. See here for more information.

What makes the skills generation different from the other metadata fields is Generator’s ability to coordinate with a user-provided list as part of the generation process. Generator can work with your organization’s Skills Taxonomy to help normalize the defined skills with other skills used in your organization.

Skills Taxonomy

Organizations may want to coordinate the skills metadata output by Generator with the same set of skills the organization uses in their other systems. To support this use case, Generator can integrate a skills taxonomy in the skills metadata generation process. A skills taxonomy is a structured list of skills defined at the organization level that identifies the capabilities of a business in a quantifiable way. Essentially, it is a system that classifies and catalogs skills within an organization.

To import a skills taxonomy into Generator, use the POST /api/v1/jobs/taxonomy endpoint. This endpoint accepts information that describes how the application should process and interact with the taxonomy. The required properties are described below:

  • taxonomy_csv - this is the taxonomy file itself. Generator only accepts skills taxonomies in CSV format at this time.
  • csv_skill_col_name - this is the column label that specifies the skill names. The names specified by this column will ultimately be the skills included in the pool of possible metadata values.
  • taxonomy_id - this is the identifier used to identify this specific taxonomy.

The GENERATION__SKILL_TAXONOMY configuration setting

After importing one or more skills taxonomies, you must specify which taxonomy should be used when generating the skills metadata. To do so, the application’s GENERATION__SKILL_TAXONOMY configuration value should be set to the ’taxonomy_id’ of the intended taxonomy. More information about configuration settings can be found here. Using this setting, you can import multiple taxonomies into your Generator instance and swap between them as necessary.

By default, the configuration is empty (has a value of ""). When the GENERATION__SKILL_TAXONOMY configuration value is empty (has a value of ""), the application will NOT coordinate the skills generation with any skills taxonomy. Therefore, you must change this configuration setting in order to involve your skills taxonomy in Generator’s skills generation process.

Skills Metadata Generation

As mentioned previously, skills generation jobs can be initiated either through:

  • a content import job, or
  • a field generation job.

But, in short, the skills metadata generation process follows one of two processes, depending on if the metadata generation process should coordinate results with a skills taxonomy:

  • Skills Generation without an external Skills Taxonomy - In order to generate skills metadata for a course without coordination of a skills taxonomy, the user should:

    1. confirm that the GENERATION__SKILL_TAXONOMY configuration setting has an empty value, and then
    2. initiate a field generation job, either through the course import process or via a field generation job. See here for more details.

  • Skills Generation with an external Skills Taxonomy - In order to generate skills metadata for a course in coordination with a skills taxonomy, the user should:

    1. successfully import a taxonomy into the application using the POST /api/v1/jobs/taxonomy endpoint,
    2. set the application’s ‘GENERATION__SKILL_TAXONOMY’ configuration setting with the ’taxonomy_id’ value of the imported taxonomy
    3. initiate a field generation job, either through the course import process or via a field generation job. See here for more details.