Best practice forum (Archived)

Audience based off course enrollment

Hi All,

I am looking for some insight on how to keep a person enrolled in a certification based on the completion of one of the course in the certification.

A real life example is as follows:

Dynamic Audience is set up that initially assigns a learner to a certification: Confined Space Program

An Employee arrives that does not meet the rules for the audience. The Learners supervisor adds him to the course manually.

The course itself is an annual requirement and is set up as a certification because learners complete the course at various dates annually versus everyone completing it on a specific date each year.

Audience rules that are based on course completion for the confined space course do not work in any of the three options for course completion, course completion date, or course completion duration (this is due to the certification unenrolling the user from the course when the window opens).

My quandary is how to set up learners who are not assigned to the dynamic audience and normally are not required to complete the course but if they do complete the course then it MUST expire after one year.

The Only options I can think of is to have a set audience that assigns those specific learners who can not meet audience rules to the certification or assign them as individuals from within the certification.

Does any one have any use cases where they did something differently than this.

All comments are welcome.

Thank you,

Peter

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Hi Peter.

I wonder if maybe you're over-engineering it.

Would it be sufficient to just assign the users to the certification. Don't assign them to the course - this will happen automatically as a consequence of certification participation.

You could use any method of assignment to the certification - individuals, set audience, dynamic audience, etc and can add users at any time (directly to the cert or into an audience). If you don't set a completion date for the assignments then they will see "no due date set".

Users can complete the course if they choose, otherwise the certification will sit there waiting for them.

If you choose "Use completion date" as the expiry calculation method, then when they complete the course, the certification will be due to expire after the chosen period (you want to set it to one year). You could investigate the other method to see if they might be more useful (in your case I think completion date might be best, because it sounds like you don't want to grant them extra certification time for completing before the expiry date).

Set a "window open period" to something sensible, and the course progress will be reset when it opens (you could choose 1 year if you want, and course progress would reset and re-open the day after completion). If left to expire then it will show "expired" and "overdue", but the "overdue" can be ignored, or you can choose different columns to display in the Record of Learner: Certifications report. They are still free to complete it or not at a later date.

Nathan

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Hi Nathan,

If I do not assign them with an audience but assign them as an individual in the certification There is a message that says "Important: Users assigned to this program will not necessarily have access to the courses in it. Please review visibility of the courses." I have audience based visibility enabled.

Any Ideas?

Peter

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Hi Peter.

Have you set your course visible only to enrolled users?

I tried an experiment. I set up a course which was visible to enrolled users only. Then I added that course and a user to a certification. This resulted in the message that you reported. I then tried logging in as the user and could access the certification. But the course launch button in the certification was disabled. This isn't what I was expecting. Being assigned to a program or certification should enrol users to the courses that they contain.

It's pretty simple to explain why this happened. Users are not technically enrolled into the courses inside programs and certifications until they first try to access them. But for this course, it only allows access if the user is already enrolled. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You really should be able to do this, so we're going to treat it as a bug. Could you please file a support request, and we will keep you updated on the progress of the patch.

Until the patch comes out, I can suggest a workaround. It's a little more work than should be required when it's working correctly, but it's still a lot simpler than what you were trying to do earlier. Set the course visibility to "Enrolled users and members of the selected audiences" and select your audience (make sure you use the "Add visible audiences" button), but don't enrol the audience or individuals in the course. Then in the certification, assign the same audience. You'll still see the warning about course visibility, but you can ignore it. Users should see the Launch button for the course inside the certification and will be enrolled when they first click it.

Another solution would be to simply set the course visible to all users, if you don't mind all users on the site from seeing it in the "Find Courses" page. If users who are not assigned to the certification try to access it then they will see "You can not enrol yourself in this course." (assuming you haven't enabled another enrolment method such as "Self enrolment").