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Advanced Search

Search Tips

 
World Lecture Hall's Advanced Search offers you a variety of ways to search for the course materials you want. You may search for words or topics you are interested in, those you want to exclude, and features you may find helpful.

Keep in mind that for the time being, you can search only for the following:
  • course names
  • course components
  • the course author's name
  • the name of the institution that hosts the course material, and
  • comments supplied by the course author
You cannot search course content itself, so we recommend that you keep the search relatively simple.

That said, here are some tips for using the advanced search.


You may enter more than one keyword at a time. To search for all the words you specified, click all. Conversely, to search for any of the words you specified individually, click any.

For example, if you wanted to search for all microbiology courses at the University of Texas, you could search for "microbiology texas" with all clicked. Doing this search with any clicked would gather all the microbiology courses in WLH, as well as all those at the University of Texas. It may even gather courses about Texas history. If, on the other hand, you wanted to search for all the courses in WLH from McGill University and the University of Toronto, you would use the keywords "mcgill toronto" and any clicked. Here, searching with all clicked would likely return no classes, since few courses if any are offered at both McGill and Toronto.


You may enter words, concepts, institutions, etc. you wish to avoid. For example, if you are looking for all microbiology classes not offered at Texas, you could enter "microbiology" into the Keywords field and "texas" into the Exclude field. The Exclude field gives you the choice between excluding all or any of the words entered. So, for example, if you entered "texas a&m" into the Exclude field with all clicked, no courses from Texas A&M University will be retrieved in the search. Executing that search with any clicked will exclude classes from classes from the University of Texas as well as Alabama A&M University.


This function allows you to resrict your search to a specific area of study. The default, All areas, searchs all course categories. If you wish to restrict your search to several categories, we recommend you leave this bar set to All areas and include the names of those categories in the keywords field. Similarily, you may exclude categories by entering them in the exclude field.

You can restrict your search further by specifying that all results in your search contain certain components by clicking any combination of boxes in the All results include list:


And finally, the Sort results list allows you to specify how the results are sorted, so that you can more easily find your desired course materials once the search is returned. Note here that, too, you can enter more than one option:




 
Last updated January 28, 2008. Maintained by WLH administrator at
the Center for Instructional Technologies, a unit of
the Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment, at
The University of Texas at Austin.