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Configure Course Tags

🔐 Account type(s) with default permissions to manage this: Administrator

💻 Tier(s) this is available for: Foundation, Essential, Pro

Course Tagging connects your district's schedule data to Ellevation's Forms workflow by assigning each course a subject or content area. This matches the right educators to your EL students' Forms and clearly identifies any courses you want excluded from Forms Matching. Plan to review and update Course Tags at least once a year, each semester, or whenever new courses are added to your schedule file.

▶️ Watch this short overview video

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Courses can be tagged with the following content areas:

  • ELA
  • ELD
  • Elective
  • Homeroom
  • Math
  • Science
  • Social Studies
  • Special Education
  • Dual Language Arts
  • Career and Tech Ed
  • Arts and Music
  • Interventions/Online Learning
  • PE and Health
  • World Language

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🔎 Before You Begin

To access Course Tagging, navigate to the Admin menu > Forms Settings > Course Tagging. From there, you can scroll through the full course list or use the search bar to locate specific courses.

💡 Quick Tip

Use this keyword and course name reference guide to quickly search for groups of similar courses — especially helpful for large schedule files.

Ellevation recommends starting with Auto-Tagging to tag the majority of your courses at once, then manually tagging or adjusting any courses that remain untagged or need correction.

Auto-Tag Courses

Auto-Tagging compares each course name against a weighted word bank to assign the most appropriate content area. When a course name matches terms for multiple subjects — for example, "Art History" — the higher-weighted term determines the tag. To start, click the blue Auto-Tag button. Ellevation cycles through your courses and automatically tags most of them. When the process is complete, a report displays how many courses were tagged and how many remain untagged.

Animated demonstration of the Auto-Tag button being clicked in Course Tagging, showing courses being tagged automatically

📝 Clicking the Auto-Tag button automatically assigns content area tags to courses based on course name matching.

After Auto-Tagging completes, review the results to confirm courses were tagged correctly. Use the Tagged By filter to isolate auto-tagged courses and check that each one is assigned to the appropriate content area. Make any corrections manually as needed.

Course Tagging screen showing the Tagged By filter applied to display auto-tagged courses, with content area assignments visible in the list

📝 Use the Tagged By filter to review which courses were auto-tagged and verify their content area assignments.

Manually Tag Courses

After Auto-Tagging, use manual tagging to handle any remaining untagged courses or to correct tags that need adjustment.

Tag a Single Course

To tag an individual course, locate it in the list and click the corresponding dropdown under Content Area. Select the appropriate subject — for example, tag an art course as Elective or a Biology course as Science.

Course Tagging screen showing the Content Area dropdown open for a single course, with subject options listed

📝 Select a content area from the dropdown to tag an individual course.

Tag Courses in Bulk

To save time, you can tag multiple similar courses at once using bulk tagging:

  1. Use the search field to enter a keyword or course code to surface a group of similar courses. (Use this keyword reference guide to find common course names.)
  2. Check the box next to Course Name to select all courses in the results.
  3. Click Bulk Tag.
  4. In the popup window, select your subject tag and click Apply Changes.
Animated demonstration of the bulk tagging workflow: searching for courses, selecting all, clicking Bulk Tag, and applying a content area

📝 Use the bulk tagging workflow to tag groups of similar courses at the same time.

Exclude Courses from Forms Matching

Some courses should not drive teacher matching in Forms, even if they are tagged with a content area. For example, if a "Writing Intensive" course is tagged as ELA and marked as Exclude from Forms, teachers of that course will not be matched as the ELA Teacher on a student's form.

⚠️ Warning

Any course left Untagged will also exclude its teachers from Forms Matching when a cycle is created — this happens automatically, without checking the Exclude from Forms box. Ellevation recommends tagging all courses and intentionally using the Exclude from Forms checkbox only for courses you specifically want to exempt.

To mark a course as excluded, check the Exclude from Forms checkbox in the course row.

Course Tagging screen showing the Exclude from Forms checkbox checked for a course row

📝 Check the Exclude from Forms box to prevent a course's teachers from being matched in Forms cycles.

Find Untagged Courses

To quickly identify any courses that still need tagging, use the Content Area dropdown filter and select Untagged. This surfaces all courses without a content area assignment so you can address them efficiently.

Course Tagging screen with the Content Area filter set to Untagged, showing only courses without a content area assignment

📝 Filter by Untagged to find all courses that still need a content area assigned.

Quick Tips

▶️ Watch this short quick tips video

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