Suggest Totara Learn features

Adding Courses to Learning Plan Templates

Welcome to this forum!

I'm creating some learning plan templates for the first time, and it seems like you can't add courses to the templates until you are assigning them to individual learners. I feel like this defeats the purpose of having a pre-made template if you have to add the courses each time you assign the plan. Is there a way to add courses to a template prior to assigning learners, so all the manager will have to do is select the template for the learner, assigning the plan with courses intact? If not, could we make this enhancement in a future update?

Thanks.

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I agree Mayeso, learning plans are great if you want them to be created for individuals but the learning plan template offers no real value. We had explored using them for mandatory training based on job role groups, but when we realised you couldn't add courses simply we stopped exploring that as an option.

I did come across a possible solution which involved creating a competency framework and assigning courses to that. You then had to assign the competency to an organisation. When you then created a learning plan template under advanced workflow there was a way you could link to courses, the final step was to go into the Audience, select the learning plan tab and then select the plan template from the drop-down list. When I was testing this it did fail to work on some tests (the plan failed to be populated with courses) and I did give up in the end as it was much too admin-heavy to be of any real benefit.

Sue

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Thank you for sharing your experience and advice, Sue! This has been informative and helpful in inspiring a workaround. For required learning, we use the programs, but we were excited to roll out learning plans to aid our learners with professional development. While this feature will be useful for individual learners to customize their own professional development track, this doesn't meet our need for providing managers with learning tracks, outside of the required learning, that they can assign to one or more of their direct reports. I can think of a way to use programs to meet the need, but there's a bit of "rewiring" I'll need to do to make that work for us (basically, rename our required learning category to avoid confusion and grant managers program assignment permissions for each program). That workaround could be avoided if we could simply attach courses to learning plan templates. One would think that would be the key feature of the tool. Seems, I was mistaken. I'm hopeful Totara will consider making this improvement in the future.

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Hi Mayeso

The auto assigning of courses to learning plans can be achieved through competencies but quite complex and admin intensive.

An alternative is to use performance activities if you have Perform installed and use achievement paths for a competency that has a criteria of completing a course. There are other possible achievement paths as documented in the link above.

Competencies can be assigned to users by audience and various roles can approve or view the performance activity.

There are some resources on the Academy that may help provide give more guidance.

regards

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Hello, Craig,

Thank you for sharing this information. Presently, we don't have Perform installed. Fortunately, we were able to come up with an alternative approach. I appreciate your assistance with this.

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Hi Mayeso, would you mind sharing your new found approach? This is a topic that comes up often for us as well.
Thank you in advance.

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Hey, Lorenzo! As an alternative to using the learning plans, we rely on the Programs feature. Basically, we created programs to take the place of the learning plan templates we had in mind. Then, so learners can self-enroll, we created audiences for those programs then and "course pages" for self-enrollment. So, when users get the 'Choose Course' prompt and select it, the audience is configured to add them to the audience when they enroll. To close the loop, the audience is configured to assign its members to the program. It sounds like a bit of a convoluted process, but it's simple to set up (albeit, more steps than I prefer). The only issue is there's a lag in assigning users to the audience, so learners won't have access to the program content right away. It takes about 3-5 minutes.

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I see, this is a very smart workaround! Of course the assignment into the program will be a bit longer, but it sounds like an acceptable compromise.

Thank you for sharing.

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