Introduction
This article will help you understand how importances work within Talis Courseflow, why you will find them useful and how you can configure them to work best for your institution.
Setting Importances
When you are in list edit view, any bookmark on a list will show metadata about that item, as well as an importance. By default - ie when newly added - the importance will default to displaying as 'Importance not set'. For list publishers, this feature will display in red to indicate that an action can be taken here; student viewers will simply see a gap.
Clicking on the 'Importance not set' drop down will allow a list publisher to attach an importance to the item. The screenshot above shows five suggested options, but these can be altered to suit your University's preferred terminology (see 'Configuration').
Selecting an importance for an item can be very useful in guiding the reading of your student audience, particularly if you are working with a long list where students are not expected to view every item. For example, marking an item as ‘Essential’ will make it clear to the end user that this item really shouldn’t be missed when carrying out set reading.
Currently it isn't mandatory to attach an importance to each reading list item. To meet the needs of Universities who would prefer that this feature was mandatory, we are planning some development later this year so that it will be possible to force list publishers to set an importance for each item, though institutions that don't require this will be able to opt out.
Configuration
Institutions can update the importances they use at any time using the Settings area of Talis Courseflow. More information is available in this article: Settings - Importances