Structure

For educators

While a course is indexed, Alexandria reads each source and groups related ideas into topics, then links material to the topics it supports. The structure tab reports how that turned out.

It answers a question that is otherwise hard to check: does the course’s material actually cover the concepts it is meant to teach, or is some of it unattached to anything.

The Structure tab headed 86 percent of your course material is currently covered by the topics created during indexing, noting 450 unique sources of which 385 are linked and 65 unlinked, above three explanatory cards reading 65 sources could be reviewed, 60 topics are shared across sources and 14 unique topics represented in this course. A Source Distribution bar chart ranks topics including Computational Fluid Dynamics at 172 sources, Eutectic Freeze Crystallization at 75, Unlinked at 65, Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes, Sliding Mesh Method and Y plus at 31 each, with each bar split into exclusive and shared segments, and a Topic overlap table below lists shared-source counts between topic pairs — Structure for a course with two indexed documents.

Coverage

The headline figure is the share of sources linked to at least one topic. Beneath it are the raw counts: how many sources the course was divided into, how many are linked, and how many remain unlinked.

Sources are fragments of material, not whole documents. A single lecture produces many sources, which is why the totals are larger than the document count.

Source distribution

One row per topic, ordered by size. Each bar divides into:

Exclusive: sources that support only this topic
Shared: sources that also support another topic

A topic that is almost entirely shared is not a distinct concept in your material so much as a thread running through it. A topic that is almost entirely exclusive is self-contained.

Sort by Sources or Documents to distinguish a topic concentrated in one lecture from one distributed across several.

Selecting a topic opens its sources, filterable by document or page, with a link through to the material in the reader.

The Unlinked row

Sources that matched no topic confidently. This is normal, and the figure is usually small.

Unlinked sources are typically headers, transitions, administrative notes, or fragments too short to classify. A large unlinked share is worth examining: it can indicate material that scanned poorly, or a document whose content differs from the rest of the course.

Topic overlap

Topics that share at least one source, ordered by the strength of the connection. The number on each pill is the count of shared sources.

Strong overlap between two topics you consider separate suggests the material treats them together. That is sometimes correct and sometimes a sign that a distinction you intend to draw is not being drawn in the text.

This section appears only where at least two topics share a source. A course whose topics are entirely self-contained will not show it.

Subtopics

Where the indexing produced them, subtopics refine a topic: definitions capture the general idea, applications describe how it appears in this specific course. Where none were produced, the summary says so.

Why the tab may be empty

Structure reports on indexing, so it has nothing to show until indexing has produced something.

No documents have been processed yet. Upload material and wait for processing to finish.
Processing failed. Failed documents are excluded.
The course has material but no topics. Rare, and usually means the content is too short or too fragmentary to classify.

Availability

Structure is available to educators, teaching assistants, and administrators. Students never see it, regardless of the course setting.

It can be switched off per course under settings.