We would love to have our course catalog (that we use only for online/enduring courses) be able to be sorted by date (of when that activity launched). This would help our users to be able to sort to see the newest (most recently launched) courses. It would also be amazing if we could choose some of our courses (especially ones we get funding for) highlighted at the top of our lists vs falling in the middle when we publish lots of courses after them.
EthosCE does have the sort by activity event date available for catalog sorting.
But “activity launch” isn’t a date in EthosCE. We could use the the activity start date, but I’m not sure that would get at what you are looking for here, because a newly launched (published) courses might have a start date far in the future and not fall at the top of the list. For example, for a course that is being publicized months before registration opens.
How would you want to defined launched to best meet this requirement?
Hi @ewolfe !
So our catalog does have filters at the top for “Event Date” but they don’t work for us. Most of our courses are online for 1-2 years so we would want them connected to the start date that we set up in the “Date/Time” section of the edit menu. When users click the sort by date (up arrow) and sort by date (down arrow) nothing happens so I’m assuming that the dates for the sorter are only for live events and connected to live dates? Or just a glitch and not connected at all? You can see it here: Courses | National Kidney Foundation
Danielle
Yes, that’s correct, the sorting is by live event date. If you don’t have any live events, then the order would not change.
We’ll track this item as a feature request. Thanks for your input!
Thank you! It would be so great to have the ability to promote our newest courses at the top (and then also push our expiring courses one more go) with date fields on our online courses 
Has anyone done a user study? Do people peruse our catalogs? Or do they simply use SEARCH to find a course they wish to take? Like Danielle, we struggle with the options of the course blocks for enduring activities. But perhaps no one actually uses those blocks as we think they do?
I know that our users tell us they will put in their discipline (we accredit for the whole healthcare team) and then they want to see the newest stuff to see if they’ve taken everything we have up yet. We also have program planners who hate that their new courses always end up at the end of our listing because they work so hard and then it feels like they are hidden away in the back of our catalog!
Regarding User Studies as to whether our users use the catalog versus the keyword search, yes, Mayo Clinic users do both. We actually used Google Analytics to analyze where our users go once they enter our site, and they are using the catalog quite a bit. The search is used when they want to find a course quickly and purchase it. But, when they are just looking at Destinations or courses within a certain timeframe, they will use Catalog all the time.
That is so helpful! Thank you for sharing!
Patricia
We no longer point our users to the catalog. It’s too cumbersome when you have hundreds of activities open at the same time. Instead, we have learning groups for each of the 14 topic areas decided on by our educational oversight committee. Everything that is created gets assigned to a group. There is a table in the middle of our home page that lists the topic areas with links to the groups, and we steer people to it when they’re looking for content. For jointly-provided activities (all regional, state, or local meetings), there is a panel just below this table that lists all the upcoming live activities, and we also have a learning group for these that we can direct people to.
We have a section on the right side of our home page where we highlight new content, and we use the slideshow feature heavily to promote new and/or extra-important things like an upcoming AAAAI Presidential Initiative food allergy course that’s open for registration. The slideshow is changed pretty regularly to keep it fresh.
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Gail can you please share your website? You are giving me ideas for our online catalog listing.
Sorry. I haven’t been on the community in a while. The link to the site follows:
Cheers!