Hi all,
My HR team have developed a series of courses for our staff and they are all optional.
Is there a way to display the courses as optional and other courses as mandatory training under My Learning?
I understand I can wrap them in a program but we would like all of these courses as single courses.
Best regards
Jennifer
Hi Jennifer
If these are added to a program as course sets with some being mandatory and some optional this would achieve this.
Can you describe in more detail the problem with not being a single course. The courses can be completed individually even though they are part of a program and will show on Record of learning as having completed the course
Regards
Hi Craig,
I was searching for a course setup for mandatory and options and came across this, so replying to this now.
I have a program "ABC" and two courses A1 and B1. If my course A1 is mandatory and B1 is optional, is there a way to indicate them in user dashboards and reports accordingly? It can be through colours, symbols or an icon, but has to be in the dashboard, not hidden text in courses and seminars.
Please let me know if you need further details.
Regards,
Santosh
Hi Santosh,
Thanks for your question here. I don't think there's a specific feature that shows whether courses are mandatory or optional outside of the program context, but I can think of some ways you could do this. For example, you could:
Put [mandatory] or [optional] in course titles to make it easier to see at a glance
Create different course categories for mandatory and optional courses to allow for easy report/catalogue filtering
For user dashboards, you could create a convention around the course image (used in the catalogue and the tile view of the Current learning block for example) where you include either a particular colour or an icon that denotes mandatory or optional content
Do you think any of those might work?
Hi Rachel,
Sorry for the late reply.
I was aware of the options provided by you and that did not solve our requirement.
I am looking for alternative solutions, probably via plug-ins as this has become really necessary for us.
Thanks again for taking time to reply.
Regards,
SB
Hi Santosh
You could set up a course custom field and choose either mandatory or optional, then filter each report to only show either optional or mandatory. The course names wouldn't show as optional or mandatory but your table / dashboard headings could.
You can also add this as a filter to the course catalog and save a search with each filter applied.
Jane
Hi Jane,
Thank you for the reply.
I have tried that as well as using images in tiles view. While both of them solve the requirement partially (specially reports), it does not get the data for learners in list view in their dashboards to identify the course. As most of our LMS users are mobile users, the requirement is tricky and I might have to find a different way to solve this.
Regards,
Santosh
Hi Santosh
We achieve this by having all our allocated (or mandatory) training being enrolled via audiences. Anything that a staff member self enrols into or is added via a manual enrolment method is recommended. Then on our dashboard, we have set up a Mandatory Training report table block (which is filtered to only show those courses where the user is enrolled via the audience sync method) and a Recommended Training report block (which is filtered to only show those courses where the user is enrolled via self/manual method).
Has worked well for us, and allows courses that are Mandatory for some staff (e.g. Basic Life Support) to still come up as recommended for others, dependent on enrolment method
Thanks
Matt
Hi Matthew,
Sorry for the late reply. Our courses are not uniform with enrolment methods as we have 100s of courses and 4000+ staff where different disciplines follow different methods for roles and courses. While I try to standardise it, sometimes it is really hard to keep them in line in terms of enrolment methods. Also, I needed all course types in a single block with colours so that courses could be prioritised by relevant staff.
Thank you for sharing, but I have gone the route of plugin, which has sorted the requirement for now.
Regards,
Santosh
Hi Santosh, no worries. My solution is fairly scalable though - I am currently responsible for about 25,000 learners across 5 health organisations with approximately 1200 live courses. It just requires sticking to a process.
Good luck with the plugin!
Thanks
Matt
Hi Santosh,
We have a similar issue and would be interested to know what plug-in you have used and how this solved the problem.
Thanks
Sue
Hi Sue,
We developed one using the support of our vendor. It did cost us some money, but that is what our managers wanted for their large teams. It basically gives an option to create blocks with options of colours and icons that we need.
Regards,
Santosh