Guidance Search
Students often remember reading something — “the bit about the observation template” — but not which week it was in. Guidance search lets them type a keyword on the student guidance page and jump straight to the week that mentions it, instead of paging back week by week.
Who it’s for: students using the [dcc_student] guidance page. Administrators need to know what it covers so they can set expectations. There is nothing to configure — the search box appears automatically on the student guidance page.
Where to find it
The search box is part of the [dcc_student] shortcode (see On-page guidance and progress tracker):
| Page type | Placeholder text in the box | Searches |
|---|---|---|
All-courses page ([dcc_student]) |
“Search guidance across all courses…” | Every course the student is enrolled in that has a timeline — including finished courses, so students can still look back at completed subjects |
Single-course page ([dcc_student course_id="…"]) |
“Search guidance across all weeks…” | That course’s current timeline |
On the all-courses page the box sits in the page header under the week navigation. On a single-course page it sits under the progress tracker. On a single-course page, the box is hidden for a week that has no guidance (the page shows only the week navigation and a notice). Move to a week with guidance to search.
The trainer page ([dcc_trainer_edit]) does not have a search box.
Searching guidance
- Open your guidance page and click in the search box.
- Type at least 2 characters. Results appear when you pause typing (after about a third of a second), or straight away if you press Enter.
- While the search runs, the results area shows “Searching…”.
- Each result shows:
- Week {N} — the week the prompt belongs to;
- the course name (all-courses page only);
- the prompt subject;
- a short snippet — the first 30 words of the prompt body as plain text.
- Select a result to open the guidance page at that week.
- To clear the search, select the × (Clear search) button. The results close and the cursor returns to the search box. Deleting your text below two characters also closes the results.
If nothing matches, you’ll see “No results found.” If the search could not reach the site (for example the connection dropped), you’ll see “Search failed. Please try again.”
Where a result takes you
Each result links to the guidance page with the course and week added to the address:
- Single-course page: the page opens on that week.
- All-courses page: the page works out the dates of that week in the result’s course and shows all courses as at those dates. The course you searched in shows the matching week; your other courses show whatever week they were in at the same time.
What search covers
Search looks for your text anywhere in a prompt’s subject or body:
- Case doesn’t matter — “Observation” and “observation” find the same results.
- Part-words match — “observ” finds “observation”, “observing” and “unobserved”.
- The exact sequence of characters must appear. “observation template” finds only prompts containing that exact phrase; it does not search for the two words separately. Spelling must be right — there is no spelling correction or synonym matching.
Included:
- Prompts for the Student and Both audiences.
- Weeks from week 1 up to and including the current week of each course’s timeline.
Not included:
- Future weeks. Guidance for weeks the timeline hasn’t reached is never returned, even if it has already been written.
- Trainer-only prompts. These are never searched, even on a page that uses
show_trainer_notes="true". - Courses the student is not enrolled in. Each course is checked against the student’s enrolment before it is searched.
- Attachments and linked lessons. Only the text written in the prompt is searched — not the contents of attached files or lesson pages.
Limits
- Minimum 2 characters. Shorter searches are not sent.
- Up to 30 results per course, taken from the earliest weeks first. On the all-courses page each course can return up to 30, and results from all courses are then sorted together by week number, then subject.
- Results are listed by week, starting from week 1. If a common word returns lots of hits, add more of the phrase to narrow it down.
- Search needs JavaScript. Without it, students can still use week navigation.
How “current week” is worked out
The search cut-off is calculated from the timeline’s start date, allowing for scheduled breaks.
- Fixed period timelines: this is the same week every student sees.
- Rolling timelines: each student’s own week is counted from their enrolment date, but the search cut-off uses the timeline’s start date. A student who enrolled after the timeline started can therefore find results from weeks ahead of their own current week. If that matters for your course, avoid putting time-sensitive material in Rolling-timeline prompts until the week it applies.
Permissions and privacy
- Only logged-in users can search. Each search is checked by WordPress before results are returned.
- Each course is searched only if the user is enrolled in it in the active LMS (or a student member of the class in Native mode). This applies to administrators too: a site administrator previewing a single-course page for a course they are not enrolled in will get “No results found.”
- Searches are not saved or logged.
Troubleshooting
“No results found.” for something I know exists.
- Check the spelling and try a shorter part of the word.
- The prompt may be in a future week, or written for trainers only.
- On a single-course page, the search covers only that course. Use the all-courses page to search everything.
- If you are an administrator testing the page, enrol a test student and search as them.
Nothing happens when I type. Type at least two characters. If the page still doesn’t respond, it may not have loaded its scripts — reload, and if it persists ask your site administrator to check for JavaScript errors or a caching or optimisation plugin interfering with the page.
“Search failed. Please try again.” The request to your site did not complete. Check your connection and try again. If you have been on the page for a long time (more than a day), reload it first — the page’s security token may have expired.
Accessibility
- The search area is marked as a search region labelled “Search guidance”, and the box has a screen-reader label (“Search guidance across all weeks” or “Search guidance across all courses”).
- Results are in a live region, so screen readers announce “Searching…”, the results or “No results found.” as they appear.
- The × button is labelled “Clear search”, works with the keyboard, and returns focus to the search box.
Worked example
Harbourside Training Academy runs a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment on a Fixed period timeline. It is week 9.
- A student remembers a tip about mapping assessment tools to units of competency. On the “Weekly Guidance” page she types mapping.
- Three results appear: Week 3 “Reading a unit of competency”, Week 6 “Building your mapping matrix” and Week 9 “Assessment validation preparation”, each with a 30-word snippet.
- Week 12’s prompt also mentions mapping, but week 12 hasn’t arrived yet, so it doesn’t appear.
- She selects the Week 6 result. The page opens on week 6 of her course, and she uses Return to Current Week when she’s done.
Related
- On-page guidance and progress tracker
- Shortcode reference
- Prompt management — audiences and how prompts are written
- Role guide: Student