Best practice forum (Archived) - Visible Learning for Audiences?

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Visible Learning for Audiences?

Hello

I was reading the online help file for audiences and it makes reference to "visible learning" for audiences. http://help.totaralms.com/audiences.htm

I need this functionality for a customer but I can't figure out how to turn it on. I read in another post that the online help file is wrong and that this does not exist yet. If that is the case I'm confused. I know of a customer using 1.9 that has this. Should I assume someone customized it for them? Or, is it in fact available somewhere?

thanks

Matt

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Hi Matt,

Im afraid the Help is wrong on this issue, there is a review of the Help underway at the moment.

There is a discussion of the issue you rasied here:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17331#p10596

Hope this helps,

George.

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Thanks George. If I'm reading that correctly, it sounds like you can do it in Moodle 2.4 with cohorts but its not yest available in Totara. Correct?

Best

Matt

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Well, it's allegedly available in Moodle 2.4 but we've not really tested that particular functionality yet, so can't vouch for it Matt. We'll know more in a few weeks.

It's a frequently recurring request to be able to hide courses and categories based on various criteria, so it is very high on our desired features list and something we're keen to get working in Totara as soon as possible.

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I'll be excited to see it when its ready. This is probably the biggest request we get. We have actually started building our own plugin to do it, but I'd prefer not to build it if we don't have to. We have a plugin we sell called EnlightenCRM, which integrates Totara with Salesforce.com. We work with a lot of companies that either monetize training to customers or look to certify partners and so on. Therefore, they want all results tracked in their CRM.

Most of these companies want to use the same LMS to deliver employee training as they do for customer and partner training. Hence, they want to be able to restrict visibility or enrollment into courses that certain groups are not eligible to see. Our plan is to create a rule system in our plugin that creates rules based on fields back in Salesforce to automatically assign someone to the proper group/audience. For example, you may have a field in Salesforce called Type, which could have a value of employee, partner or customer. The rule will state "if Type equals employee then assign to the employee audience". Its quite a bit of work building that part and the corresponding Salesforce code so we would love it if the Totara side of things was already in place.

Any idea when this is expected to be available?

thanks

Matt

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Hey Sam, hope all is well in Derry!

At the moment and in the coming weeks the priority is on getting 2.4 stable and out the door, but if LP had already started down this road then I'll liaise with Mark, at the very least it'll be good to swap ideas and issues encountered, maybe share and reuse some code. As always with Moodle/Totara, these things are more complicated to implement properly than they appear to be on the surface.

I'd like to get this issue solved relatively soon though, it is always one of the most frequently-requested features.

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Hi Jason,

Our developers are well aware of the interest in this functionality & that of multi-tenancy, it will be something that will definitely be looked at but Im afraid I can't give any dates as to when this is likely to be.

regards,

George.

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Hi All,

A quick update (and apologies for cross-posting)...

T2.5 (due for realease Sept / Oct) will have some functionality which extends audience management to include 'Visibility of Content', which will enable meet the requirment of controlling the visibility of specificed Courses (and maybe categories??).

I'm still interested if options come available for older versions

Tony

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Hi All,

This is something that we too are very interested in having and look forward to any further development in this.

Cheers

Chelle

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This sounds like a great feature.

Are there any plans to allow audiences to be assigned to roles?

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At the risk of sounding repititive in this and related threads, this functionality is commonly desired by our clients and potential clients. I am delighted that this multi-tenancy type of feature is coming to fruition.

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Admins--and other users assigned to roles with "View all hidden courses" and "View all hidden progams" capabilities need to have a button [labelled with the same name as the capability] that allows them to toggle between seeing all Courses/Programs regardless of what audiences they belong to. These capabilities would also need to work on the Category context so that they work for users who are assigned Course Creator (or similar roles) on given Categories.

I don't think this is a good idea. Wouldn't it be better to just show all courses/programs regardless of audience settings in the dialogs when adding courses/programs to visible/enrolled learning. If the admin user wants to be able to see some hidden courses in the catalog they can just make them visible to an audience that they are a member of.

I think it would be less demanding to have a single dynamic Audience that contains a manageable list of all Courses and Programs that are visible to all users, and also to have a single feature area in which all Course/Program visibility is managed centrally. If we rely on a separate setting on the Course/Program page, an Admin would have to go to the Report Builder and create a report using the 'courses' report source (with the column "Allow visibility to all users" available as a column option)--and similarly with a 'programs' report source--to determine which Courses/Programs are set to "Allow visibility to all users", then go to each Course/Page editing page to make additions/substractions.

Note that enrolment/visibility is designed to work two ways - you can assign multiple courses/programs to an audience via the visible/enrolled learning tabs and you can also assign multiple audiences to a course/program via the 'edit settings' page. If you change one the other will update accordingly.

What if we created a hard-coded audience called "All users" that always included all non-deleted site users. Then people could assign courses to that audience via the visible and enrolled learning tab and use that as the way to manage that type of courses.

Simon

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Hi Jonathan,

This is a great step forward! The piece of functionality that I think would be a big win would be allowing branding/css changes based on the audience. This is a much simpler update and would have a big bang for the buck as far as multi-tenency.

While I agree with some of the other postings that a super-administrator is a good long term function, the requirements of how that administrator would be created and what it would manage or how it would manage things are a bit too nascent and at present too 'custom' or individual client specific.

Thoughts below on your questions:

When upgrading to Totara 2.5, Audience-based visibility will not be enabled. By default, visibility in the Catalog will continue to function (with respect to visibility) as it does in Totara 2.4. [TL - This is a good approach. How will it behave once this setting is enabled? Will everything by default be visible?]
When Audience-based visibility is enabled, the visibility of Courses and Programs in the Catalog will be entirely based on 1) Audiences that the user is assigned to, and 2) the Courses and Programs assigned to those Audiences. [TL - Will this also lock down search to limit visibility to catalog/programs?]
In this case, the Course/Program 'visible' setting (i.e., the setting found on the Course or Program editing page) and its functionality is redundant and confusing to users working in the course administration process (Administrators, Course Creators, etc). Therefore, when Audience-based visibility is enabled, the 'visible' setting on the Course/Program page will become hidden (i.e., suppressed) and its functionality will not be used in the Catalog. [TL - Not certain that I agree the functionality is redundant. There are two different functional requirements at play. 1) Controlling visibility to the catalog/pieces of the catalog during the course editing process. 2) Controlling visibility to the catalog/pieces of the catalog following the publishing of the course. I definitely understand how this additional visibility logic could pose some development challenges, but I think the difference in the functionality is worth preserving so as not to require clients to implement a manual workaround for catalog management now that the audience-based visibility is in play.]
A warning will be added to the Site Admin setting to enable Audience-based visibility stating something like "When the setting is enabled, the visible setting on individual Courses/Programs will be hidden and it's functionality in the catalog will be disabled." [TL - see comment on #3 above]
If an Admin wants to make particular Courses (or Programs) visible in the Catalog to all users when Audience-based visibility is enabled, than the Admin can create an Audience, add all users to the Audience, and then assign the Courses (or Programs) to the Audience as 'Visible Learning'. [TL - manual effort on this seems like a poor end user experience to save a few additional lines of code.]
Admins (or similar users) will also be able to assign a Course as 'Visible Learning' to an Audience directly from the Course editing page (just as they can currently assign a Course as 'Enrolled Learning' to an Audience directly from the Course editing page). [TL - this is a good feature]
Similarly, Admins (or similar) will be able to assign a Program as 'Visible Learning' to an Audience directly on the 'Program Assignments' tab in the Program editing area (just as they can currently assign a Program as 'Enrolled Learning' in the same tab). [TL - will doing assigned learning to an audience automatically make that program/course visible to the audience even if the audience has not yet been assigned visibility? or will the drop down be restricted to only audiences that have been assigned to those programs/courses?]
When Audience-based visibility is disabled (after being enabled): 1) the 'visible' setting on the Course/Program editing pages will be unsuppressed, 2) any previously selected values for the 'visible' setting will be retained, 3) Course/Program visibility in the Catalog will be based on this setting only (i.e., returning to the Catalog's current behavior in Totara 2.4), 4) the "Visible Learning" tab in the Audience editing area, Course editing page, and Program editing area will be suppressed. [TL - see comment on #3 above]

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I have an idea that might resolve some of these issues, to answer your questions first:

How will it behave once this setting is enabled? Will everything by default be visible?

No, the proposal is that everything will be hidden by default. However see my idea below.

Will this also lock down search to limit visibility to catalog/programs?

Yes, search will be restricted with the same criteria.

will doing assigned learning to an audience automatically make that program/course visible to the audience even if the audience has not yet been assigned visibility? or will the drop down be restricted to only audiences that have been assigned to those programs/courses?

Yes, visibility will be the sum of visible learning + enrolled/assigned learning. If you are assigned to a program you will get to see it automatically.

Ok, on to my idea.

To resolve the requirement mentioned in 3 and 4, and to prevent the poor usability mentioned in 5, what if we put some extra options on the course/program editing page:

1. Course visible to all

2. Course hidden to all

3. Course visible only to the following audiences

[normal audience selector here]

This would allow admins to make a course visible to all without creating a custom audience using 1. Amir would be able to hide his courses to edit using 2. Option 3 would be the normal functionality.

The advantage of this approach is that we wouldn't need to do a per course capability check like we do with the current view hidden courses.

The only disadvantage I can see is that a course could be added to an audience but if 1 or 2 was set it would have no effect. The best solution to that would probably be to include an indication of each courses' status on the 'visible learning' tab.

We could also have a site wide setting that determines the "default" value for this new setting (when you create a new course). That would allow you to make new courses visible to all by default or controlled by audience by default.

I've attached a simple mockup to describe what I mean - let me know what you think.

Simon

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Thanks for such a quick response, Simon! I like it! Some more detailed feedback is below. -T

---------------------

will doing assigned learning to an audience automatically make that program/course visible to the audience even if the audience has not yet been assigned visibility? or will the drop down be restricted to only audiences that have been assigned to those programs/courses?

Yes, visibility will be the sum of visible learning + enrolled/assigned learning. If you are assigned to a program you will get to see it automatically. [TL - sorry on this one, I don't know if my thought/question got through on this one - or if it did and I just didn't understand your answer. Here's the user story I was thinking of... Admin creates a course/program and sets it 'Hidden to all'. Admin later creates audience and attempts to assign course/program to audience. Will the course/program be an available option?]

Ok, on to my idea.

To resolve the requirement mentioned in 3 and 4, and to prevent the poor usability mentioned in 5, what if we put some extra options on the course/program editing page:

1. Course visible to all

2. Course hidden to all

3. Course visible only to the following audiences

[normal audience selector here]

This would allow admins to make a course visible to all without creating a custom audience using 1. Amir would be able to hide his courses to edit using 2. Option 3 would be the normal functionality. [TL - agree]

The advantage of this approach is that we wouldn't need to do a per course capability check like we do with the current view hidden courses.

The only disadvantage I can see is that a course could be added to an audience but if 1 or 2 was set it would have no effect. The best solution to that would probably be to include an indication of each courses' status on the 'visible learning' tab. [TL - I think this ties back to my question above. Which part would not have an effect? I'm trying to think of all the potential user scenarios where an Admin could assign learning in contradiction to a visibility setting on the course/program and what the behavior would be.]

We could also have a site wide setting that determines the "default" value for this new setting (when you create a new course). That would allow you to make new courses visible to all by default or controlled by audience by default. [TL - I like this idea as well. This is a good option to have.]

I've attached a simple mockup to describe what I mean - let me know what you think.

[TL - the mockups look good!]

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Admin creates a course/program and sets it 'Hidden to all'. Admin later creates audience and attempts to assign course/program to audience. Will the course/program be an available option?

I'm suggesting that yes, the course/program will still be available as an option and it can be added to the audience. However, for as long as the course is set to 'hidden to all', although it is assigned to the audience that would not have any effect. But, If the course admin went back and switched from 'hidden to all' to 'visible to the following audiences' then it would immediately become visible to the audience it was assigned to while hidden.

That's what I meant when I said "The only disadvantage I can see is that a course could be added to an audience but if 1 or 2 was set it would have no effect". The way to minimise that problem I was suggesting was the "Visibility" column on the "Visible Learning" tab when editing the audience. That would at least show the admin who adds the course that it won't be available.

Hope that clarifies!

Simon

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It does! Thanks Simon!

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It looks like the requirements for visible learning are coming together well

Is there any thought to extending the audience visibility to the activity level. This is currently able to be done at the activity level through groupings and setting available to group members only but this doesn't have the extensive rules that audiences have.

I don't know if this a common requirement or whether the audience could be added to a grouping type easily.

Craig

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According to this post:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17643#p13109

You can already sync groups via audiences (I think it was added in 2.4). Would that do what you want?

Simon

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Hi Simon

Yes this should work by

syncing the audience to course groups
making the groups part of a grouping
making a course activity not visible to a grouping

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Hi Amir,

Yes, it makes sense that the show/hide icon would be used to indicate the visibility. I'm not sure I like the idea of a three-way toggle though. How about the icon indicates the 3 states, but in all cases links to the visibility section of the "edit settings" page to make it easy to get to the place where you can see and change the state?

Simon

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We're not going to tackle category visibility for audience visibility - there won't be an option to hide a category for a particular audience.

Hiding categories will continue to work as before independent of the audience visibility setting.

Simon

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Hi everyone. I wanted to chime in here as this seems to be a popular topic. It sounds like the folks at Totara are working towards getting ths functionality to work, at least for accessing courses. We've been working on our own flavor of this concept for some time and we finally released our first rendition of it. For those of you that do not know us, we specialize in Totara/Moodle integration with Salesforce. Our customers tend to be for profit schools and companies that need to train their channel partners. Therefore, having an ability to restrict access is vital. We just released a plugin we are calling crowd control that will eventually be controlled by our Salesforce plugin and allow companies to create rules based on Salesforce fields to automatically assign students to appropriate "crowds". Crowds are then assigned to courses or categories and you, which means you have to be assigned to a designated crowd in order to see content also assigned to it. Our system uses chohorts/audiences as the assignment rule. Meaning, you assign audiences to our crowds and then anyone added to that audience gets added to the crowd. Since Totara has a rule system to dynamically assign folks to audiences based on profile settings, this makes for a pretty elegant system of granting access to folks automatically. For example, lets say you want to automatically approve certain partners for training. You can create a dynamic audiences with a rule set like "if email contains XXXXX" then add to the audience. That audience can then be automatically added to a "partner" crowd and they can instantly see content in that crowd while that content remains hidden to other audiences. To make all this work without having to manipulate core code, we created our own custom course/category blocks for display on the home screen that provide for a much more visual navigation. Our blocks display categories and courses iconically and navigation is similar to that of an Ipad. You click on a category and it expands to reveal sub categories and courses within. The images are pulled from the category and course descriptions. Here is a screenshot:

Anyway, just thought I'd share and see if anyone had any interest in learning more.

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I am interested in this plugin yes. But how about the issue that you have to execute corn in order that dynamic audience is functional instantly - and the users with the xxxx emails are added instantly without manial or automatic cron execution?

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Hi and sorry for the slow response. You're right, there is a delay in certain situations. When you first create the rule, it picks everyone up that already matches the rule. Any new users created or edited then get picked up in cron and are added later. I'm not sure I know the best way to handle that since its not our cron. Our long term plans for this plugin are to tie it in with our Salesforce.com plugin and allow you to create rules that link back to Salesforce. We already do things like push courses and enrollments from Salesforce to Moodle/Totara. We are just going to add the ability to also be able to assign users from Salesforce to audiences. This is obviously only a solution for Salesforce users, but that is our primary customer base. Our Salesforce app, which is called EnlightenCRM has its own plugin in Moodle and we actually setup a separate cron for it so we can have more control over timing. We will also eventually add our rule processing into this cron, which won't make it immediate, but will shorten the time period for getting folks added. Not sure if this helps you or not though.

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Hi Matt,

We have a case right now where something like this could be a good solution, so I'd want to learn more.

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Hi. Sorry for the slow response. Been one of those weeks. I'd be happy to share more information. You can reach me at mlee@envisiontel.com and we can coordinate a phone call or something. Look forward to it.

Matt

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Looking forward to this feature! One related question (in a scenario where a Totara customer provides courses to their customers):

Would this somehow also enable a customer to let the their customers' administrators enrol students into courses (and F2F-activities) - without being able to see students from other customers/audiences..?

//Rickard

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