Best practice forum (Archived)

Reoccurring Program and how to make it work

We are having issues getting the reoccuring programs to work and feel like it is something we are just grasping incorrectly. We have an annual training that all employees are required to take on the anniversary of their hire date. So we set up the reoccurring to repeat every 365 days and the notice to go out 2 weeks before the due date which is linked to their hire date. Unfortanatley, all we can get to show up is their actual hire date for the due date. What are we doing wrong?

I have attached some screen shots on how we were testing this out. The example I made was to have the course repeat every 2 days, just so we could see how it would generate. Any assistance anyone could offer would be much appreciated!!!!

Sample.pdf

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Hi Chris,

The "Due date" is designed for a one-off date which designates the end of the Program - in the case of a recurring Program this is redundant. The date you are seeing is the complete by date - the date specified by the "minimum time required" under the program content tab. As for your problem with the 2-day test, I think if you change the repeat to 3 days you'll avoid the conflict with time completion and the course re-creation. Its a gnarly one I know! Do get back if any more queries.

hope this is useful.

regards,

George.

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Hi George

Your response was helpful, and I spent some more time trying to figure out the solution to get to the outcome needed. Unfortanatley, I was not successful. I understand the Due Date is redudant for reoccurring courses.The part that throws me is how to proceed under the assignments tab. If you don't mark it with a time frame, the program shows, but says no due date. This doesn't work for us. I went back and rewatched the tutorial on setting up a reoccuring course, and even that has a due date set. I also relooked at all the data in the help and still am not grasping something here. We want the reoccurring course to be due annually based on an employees hire date. We have over 1,000 + employees and growing, so to have 1 due date for all would not work for our organization. How do we make this work? Changing the "minimum time required" would not work as it only takes employees one day to complete. If we have it beyond that, to my understanding, the system will create an exception if they finish is sooner.

Thank you for any further assistance you can offer.

Have a Great Day!

Chris

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Hi Chris,

Dont be worried by the due date - it will vary for each individual assigned, what you can do is add an dynamic audience to the recurring program and then use the completion criteria to specify when you want the course to present. Say an audience consisting of a certain department who have to do the course with a year of their start date.

So create the audience (specify its dynamic) and use the rule sets to specify what criteria (say organisation) then add the audience to the program and under Complete in the assignments specify fisrt login, or position start date etc. etc.

Hope this helps,

George.

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Hi Chris and George,

I am afraid I think that there isn't such a simple solution to Chris's need.

The limitations of recurring course solution have been discussed here before. It is appropriate to use when all users need to restart the course son the same time not on an individual schedule. What it does is copy the Entire course than disables the older copy and starts the new one.

What Chris needs as I understand is actually individual recurring competency renewal. I believe there's some work towards that being planned.

Amir

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Hi Amir,

I can see there would be problems concerning the creation of the new course - I think though it would be possible to batch users in the audience apporpriately using rulesets and avoid it.

cheers,

George.

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That may be true but you shouldn't using recurring course as it would close and people cannot do it.

audience may be set up to build a group of people who completed the course but not set an individual date each has to do a new course by.

More problems expected as after people complete the course their completion records remain and are not archived so no way to let them know they need to redo it

If you search the forums for recurring competencies discussions you'll see how this has come up before and the current limited solutions offered.

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See here:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17126

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Hi Chris,

We are in a similar position where we have a series of compulsory/compliance courses which all staff must complete once every 365 days, and the anniversary is from the completion date so everyone will have different dates.

We have actually had some additional code created to enable us to have courses reoccur at the course level. This allows all courses to be rolled over for each learner on their own anniversary and we've also incorporated a function where we can update the course content or add a new 'hot topic' for the new year. This means that when you go to redo the course, you get fed the new content.

This is still quite new for us, but it seems to be a solution that works for what we're after.

Marni

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Thank you for the feedback Marni! Much appreciated!

Have a Super Day!

Chris

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Thanks for this Amir.

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