Suggest Totara Learn features

TL-5615 - Add support for audience visibility to categories

Welcome to this forum!

I've read up on this in other posts where Categories are mentioned alongside Courses with regards to Audience Level Visibility, however responses to these posted queries have confirmed that Categories cannot be hidden / viewed based on assigned Audiences (as courses can).

There are certain scenarios / click paths where learners can find themselves presented with a list of all categories on our site. Historically these have been used as internal "folders" that were never intended to be viewed.

I am aware that I can hide categories and make visible courses therein, but this seems to be throwing out a good OOTB navigation tool -- i.e a list of all categories visible to me with any courses visible then shown within.

So my feature request is to be able to set the visibility of categories based on Audience.

Of course if there are work arounds or tips that achieve a similar result I'd be most grateful if they could be shared.

Best regards
Ben

(Edited by Thomas Wood - original submission Saturday, 6 September 2014, 10:55 PM)

(Edited by Tom Ireland - original submission Wednesday, 25 February 2015, 11:25 PM - updated tracker reference.)

Permalink | Reply

The content of this forum post has been removed and can no longer be accessed.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

+ 1 for me too

Steph

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

+1 from me

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

It would be useful to understand in a bit more detail what options you would like to see available at the category level. Currently for courses there are 3 options (there will be 4 in 2.7):

Visible to all users
Visible to enrolled users and members of the selected audiences
Visible to enrolled users
(Hidden from all) <- coming in 2.7

For categories, we could do something similar however there are a number of potential conflicts that could occur:

A course is hidden but the category it is in is visible (or vice versa)
A category is hidden but a sub-category it is in is visible (or vice versa)

How would you expect conflicting settings to be resolved? Some options:

If ANY item is hidden, hide it and all children ("Safest" option)
If ANY item is visible, show it and all children (I don't think this makes sense)
Provide multiple options for categories - e.g. Hide but allow overrides, Hide and prevent overrides. I think this will make it too complex.

Overall my preference is for the first one, but it does require that we check the permissions on every parent folder which is a bit of a performance hit (the visibility checking code is already quite complex).

We would also need to show in the interface if a child item's visibility will be different from because of inherited visibility from a parent.

So as you can see, it is not a straightforward issue - but keen to gather some requirements and feedback so we can understand the scope of what people would need.

Simon

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Another option I didn't consider is that the category visibility only affects the category itself, and users are able to directly access a visible course inside a hidden category, but just won't see the category via the UI.

This would achieve the result I think the original poster was asking for (a way to prevent categories from showing) without some of the complexities I outlined above. It does however mean that a user would have no way to directly access visibile courses inside a hidden category (unless they got a url from somewhere).

Implementing like this would make it a much smaller task, would this approach cover the main use cases for this feature?

Simon

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

From my perspective, the benefit of setting visibility at the category level would mean you wouldn't have to manually set the visibility of the courses below it. In practical terms, there can be hundreds or thousands of courses in a category, and it can be a considerable job for an admin to keep updating a number of audiences every time courses are added.

I'd suggest using some kind of cascade, so that you could set the visibility of the parent categories and add them to audiences. You could then add a "based on parent visibility" option to the drop-down on child categories and courses. This would let you inherit or override the setting for specific courses or category as required.

You'd need to consider how the courses were shown in the UI in the event that a child was visible within an invisible category. Perhaps they could be rendered in their highest-level visible parent category.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

The content of this forum post has been removed and can no longer be accessed.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi,

I like Ryan's approach whereby each sub-category or course can either choose to inherit or not the properties of the parent.

This would mean that no re-work would be needed for organisations who have existing audience visibility settings on courses but moving forwards would provide more options?

Steph

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

This feature / enhancement request (tracked under enhancement ID TL-5615) has been deemed high priority and is under consideration for development by Totara core.

This does not indicate a delivery commitment. Development of the functionality is subject to further prioritization and resource availability.

Development priorities are reviewed regularly. If you wish to escalate your market need for this functionality, please contact your Totara Channel Partner Manager.

(Edited by Tom Ireland - original submission Wednesday, 25 February 2015, 11:27 PM - updated tracker reference.)

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Our cliënt works with categories for internal employees and external customers. They're already able to hide the courses within one categories for the other audience. But in the catalog the categorie name itself is still visible for those users. This is very confusing.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

The content of this forum post has been removed and can no longer be accessed.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply

Hi Alan,

Can you put in a Support ticket for this?

thanks,

George.

Permalink | Show parent | Reply