Best practice forum (Archived)

User in multiple audiences assigned to the same course

I have run into a question of which I have tested the scenario a few different ways but want to know if there was a way to prompt duplication or triplication of the the same user being added in the same course more than once.

ie: I'm part of audience A and B and they both have a same requirement for 1 or more course/s.

or, I was assigned to a course as an individual, but have also since been included as part of Audience A which also has a requirement for the same course in a program or certification or possibly 1 course.

What I'm looking for is some kind of prompt that lets the Manger, Trainer etc know that the user is already assigned to the course. The prompt might say: "user is already registered for one or more course/s do you wish to continue?" It could then display which courses are involved and provide exception reporting capability to allow changes or remove the user from 1 audience if there is significant duplication (which you could do anyway) but allow for that process when you end up at that roadblock.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Arnet

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HI Arnet,

Sorry for the delay in response on this one! There is not currently a notification to managers or trainers that someone is already enrolled in a course through another method. A Site Administrator on the other hand may have an Exceptions Report in Programs/Certifications triggered if a course:

is assigned through a certification and has already been assigned through another certification
has multiple completion dates associated with it because it was assigned through more than one program

Aside from those situations though, it's typically not a problem if a course is assigned through multiple methods. Completion via one assignment will apply to another assignment as well, as really it's the same course in the end. Do you have a use case outside of the exception issues above, where you have found an issue with multiple assignments?

If this is functionality your subscriber is interested in pursuing, I recommend posting to the Suggest Features forum.

Cheers,

Lori

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++++++1 for this one as this is currently our biggest pain point right now.

To be quiet honest I'm a bit surprised that Totara would roll out this audience feature without considering such use case. I will definitely post to the Suggest Features forum.

For Lori, I know that a Site Administrator can see it on the Exceptions Report in Programs. However, is there a way to setup so that Site Administrator will also get a email notification when this happens (and the automated email should also include key info such as user's full name, username, possibly userID as well, and the program/course that he/she was enrolled in which caused the Exceptions). For us, it's also very frustrating when the exception happens, the user will NOT be assigned to the program anymore (see this thread), which would affect the scheduled weekly reports and the user's learning record (users will no longer be seeing that they actually completed the program as long as they are on the exception list). I think it would be nice to have a setting (feature request) so that sys admins can define the default behavior when this happens. What do you think?

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Hi Wen,

There are a few things about your post above that I don't quite understand, I wonder if you could clarify?

I believe there are three separate issues here:

1. The original post which you have +1ed.

I have replied to that post here with more questions as I'm not sure I understand why it is a problem. Any extra comments you have there would be very helpful.

Based on your post here, and your comment above it sounds like you are finding that users who are already assigned to a program via one method who subsequently end up assigned via a second method are triggering exceptions and that the new exception is leading to them losing access to the program. Can you confirm if that's the problem?

If so that is definitely a bug, but I'm afraid I haven't been able to reproduce it in my testing. If you are able to open a support ticket and give us an example with step-by-step instructions on how to reproduce that problem we will look into it immediately.

2. Site administrators not receiving emails when new exceptions occur.

In most cases new exceptions occur when the administrator is making changes to the "Assignments" tab. Therefore as soon as the page reloads after making changes they will see a message indicating there are exceptions, and they will also see the exceptions tab with the count of the number of unresolved exceptions.

However I do acknowledge that there are some situations where the exceptions can occur when the administrator is not making changes (like when audience membership changes lead to exceptions). So I think you are right that it would be good to be able to choose to receive notifications about exceptions.

We will need to give some thought as to who should receive them, as well as consider combining individual messages to avoid overwhelming the receiver with thousands of almost identical messages.

I have created a separate enhancement request to track this specific issue which has the reference number 13509.

3. Ability to control the default behaviour when new exceptions do occur.

Removing the user from the program when they have an exception is the initial default behaviour because exceptions usually represent some kind of configuration issue that needs human input to resolve.

If the problem from 1 with existing users being removed is resolved (so that only newly assigned users end up with exceptions) and if we make it easier for admins to track exceptions by implementing point 2, is this feature still needed?

Simon

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This has now been raised in the Suggest Features forum and can be viewed / discussed further at https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=18856

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