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

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

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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!]