Best practice forum (Archived)

Showing different course information to guest & enrolee

I have not been able to display different information to guests of a course and enrolled people.

guest sees: spiel about the course + prerequisites + enrol button

enrolled person sees: full course

Any ideas or suggestions from what other people have done would be useful.

Thanks

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Hi Chris

I think we've had this conversation...

In any case I'll share. In our site (Government Dept LMS only for staff) we have only ever allowed authenticated users to the site (no guest access at all).

At a course page level we also removed the 'Are you sure you want to enrol' screen/process.

When a staff member visits a page they are silently 'enroled' in it.

Also: we removed any form of module level guest access after our site crashed when many staff accessed a SCORM module as 'guests' (an allowable option in that module) at the same time.

The argument for silent enrolment is:

In the early stages of your LMS users will find the 'Are you want to enrol' a barrier to actually commencing the course - this noticibly impacted our early adoption rates.
As your catalogue of courses grows staff need more information about the course than can be contained in the Course Summary. Leading to high enrolment numbers but low completation ratios.
It's a heavy administrative burden on every course page to configure what can and can't be accessed by Guests.
If your course page isn't a 'course' (say, it's an information resource) the action of 'enroling' is inconsistent with the staff member's expectation of what they are getting and either forms a barrier to entry or creates an expectation that there is more than actually offered.
In an Academic sense 'enrol' has a formal & defined meaning and both student & teacher understand what is does and doesn't mean. In business use, accessing the course page is generally less formal and when permission is required (ie to attend the sessions / pay the course fees) this can't be determined through the 'Are you sure you want to enrol' process.
Our reporting is now enhanced by using the enrolment numbers as a valid 'level of interest' measurement.
Course 'start' is measured by participation in assessment/F2F booking.
We still control access to some courses by:
- Manual enrolment (close off self enrolment)
- One-time enrolment password
- Enrolment in one course (or role) triggers enrolment in another course.

Cheers

Austen

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Thanks Austen

Yes this does suit most of our courses and we have also taken an idea from ACC to replace the language file of "You are currently viewing this course as a guest." and made a nice clear box so people are aware they need to do something to access the course

The issue is around courses or opportunities where we need to make it clear that “enrolling” is actually applying to go on the course and then they need to be approved.

The option we are currently looking at is pre ‘face2face’ work that needs to be done and then have them enrol on a face2face session that we can approve or veto.

You are 100% correct in setting the users expectation to begin with and that is what I am trying to make clear to the learners as most do not fully read the summary page before going to the course.

Chris

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Hi Chris

Ah, for this we use combinations of the following:

Conditional Activity - where a user needs to successfully complete something after which the next activity (say, a F2F) becomes visible to them.
Manager Approval in the Face-to-Face module.
Feedback module for receiving online nominations.
TNA module (customisation of the Feedback module with Manager confirmation process step) which results in a manager verified and/or approved nomination.
'Upload a signal file' assessment when they have to submit a document to support their nomination.

Cheers

Austen

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Hi Austen

This would work well for a face to face module.

If you wanted to extend this you could add course sets to a program and add the program to learning plan with manager approval required.

Once the learning plan is approved then if the devplan enrolment plugin is used learners wouldn't be able to enrol in the next course on the program until course set conditions are met.

Craig

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