Best practice forum (Archived)

Duties System approve booking

Hello

Does anyone else work in the following way, or has tried the following process:

Student requests date
Duties department approves/declines the date

I am trying to find evidence that this system works for other organisations, especially where those organisations have many courses which need to recertify and where people who don't recertify are therefore not compliant and can't do their job.

The following negative impacts have been put forward

Students may be declined a number of times, which is inefficient and annoying for the student
Students may not engage with the system and therefore run out of their skill (huge impacts for us)

Is anyone able to share their experiences?

Regards

Debbie

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Hi Debbie,

Just a thought around workflow and to get a little more info on this, are you looking to have students sign up using the Seminar activity? Are there individual duty sessions or can multiple users sign up for the same session? One option might be using the Declare Interest option in seminars to allow the student to suggest dates they are available, then the instructor can setup a seminar session for a date they know will work. Seminars can be used as an activity in certification programs, so when the student needs to recertify, they could come Declare Interest, get a date set, have the seminar marked complete, and their certification renewed.

Thanks!

Wes

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Hi Wesley

Thank you for your response. Yes, students will be signing up using the seminar activity, but rather than the manager approving, our duties team will. I have built a custom field which allows students to communicate with the 'approver', so the student can let the approver know, if they want to avoid certain dates.

We are at the build stage of our system and need to get sign off around our processes. I was looking for any other organisation who have a similar process so that I can provide evidence that my proposed process works for other organisations.

Regards

Debbie

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Good Morning Deborah,

If I'm understanding correctly:

Available sessions would be created in a Seminar activity
Users would select which session they want to attend
Their sign up would go to the Duties department for approval (as opposed to their manager)

If that's the case we can do this fairly easily in Totara.

Create a role for Duties Department
Go into the Seminar settings and say that the Duties department role can approve sign ups (at the plugin/site level, not the individual activity)
Set the Duties department up as the approval source within the seminar activity itself

Hope that helps!

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