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!