Expand Skilljar Integration to Include Lessons in Federated Search

Thanks for sharing this idea @DannyPancratz! Do you have a particular example of a lesson + search query that you could see as something that would help your community members find an answer?

Also curious to hear the thoughts of some other Skilljar integration users
@dan_at_community @Casstastr0phee 

hmm...I can see the value in this. Right now, the way our Skilljar is structured, we have certifications, courses, and lessons within courses. I can see that in Federated search, when I type in terms (ie. “SMS”), it pulls in the certification exam as the top result, but doesn’t actually include the SMS Strategy Certification. There are certainly helpful nodes of content in the lessons that Community Managers should be able to mark as content to serve up to members. 

The counter to this, in my opinion, is that it might be better to have people complete full courses rather than be able to access individual lessons one-off, because we do want people to continue upskilling. I think this could certainly be a setting that is offered that allows for lessons to be searched or not searched as a part of how Federated Search is set up. 

Update here: We’re moving off SkillJar in the coming months, so it’s less of a priority for us. 

Also, I believe the issue is what SkillJar’s API makes available, rather than anything on the Insided end. In the workarounds we explored, there wasn’t a good way to get this lesson-level data out of Skilljar in an automated fashion.

Hi there, we just introduced Skilljar and were able to set up the integration.
Would be phenomenal for our users to search for the keywords included in the Lessons, instead of only the keywords included in the course name. That way we can make sure they find the relevant content.

e.g. imagine we had the following setup:
Course: Animals
3 Lessons: Mammals;  Birds;  Fish

If they wanna learn more about “Birds”, and search for “Birds”, they’re not gonna get any results and think that there is nothing about Birds, while there is actually a whole lesson about it.

Is this a request for inSided or rather for Skilljar? 

@Daniele Cmty I believe it’s mostly a limitation of the Skilljar API. There’s no way to index lessons for search if they’re not available for Insided to access. 

We solved this using the Federated Search API and indexing the lessons ourselves. It requires finding a way to export your lessons (I don’t work hands on with Skilljar myself, so not sure how easy that is). From there, feeding your lessons into the Federated Search API is fairly easy to do.