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Show/hide course content for different groups

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Hi Totara Community,

we are getting increase requests to show/hide contents for different target groups within one course, i.e. with access restrictions.

We would like to ask your advice on these options:

audience restrictions, e.g. restrict content for audience “all users with country X”, "all users with preferred language A"
profile field restriction instead (and consequently reduce the number of audiences on our system)

What pros and cons do you see?

We are aware that for some cases, there is no solution via profile fields (e.g. in case of set audiences, or audiences based on course completions).

Also, we are in general hesitant of using content restriction for different groups, due to the risk of losing the overview of who can see what and the limitations it would bring for configuring course completion.

Any experience/best practice on how you use this feature?

Kind regards

Kathrin

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Hi,

One major con is course completion—it would be quite limited. We’ve explored setting up the same course in multiple languages, but in that case, course completion can only be configured as “complete one of the activities below.” That means each language would require one specific activity to mark the course as completed.

Additionally, if users are allowed to change their profile, applying restrictions based on profile fields can become tricky.

It really depends on how you want to group these users. If you need to combine multiple criteria, using audiences would be the better approach. If it’s just one specific profile field, you can simply use that.

Kind regards,

Irma

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Hi Irma,

sorry, for my late reply. Due to technical issues, I was not able to post in this forum for quite some time.

Thank you for your thoughts and suggestions. Yes the limitations for completions are a problem we encountered too, and we wish Totara would be more flexible in this respect.

For our use case, we decided to go with audience restrictions as follows: we place non-mandatory additional content in its own topic and make the topic visible to the specific audience. For example, the course has general information on a topic, but there is additional market specific-information which we show only to users from a specific country.

We decided against using profile fields also because some of the fiels are text fields which can be filled out in different languages and we find it easier to manage, if we use an audience in this case, or as you said, if we need to combine different criteria.

Kind regards
Kathrin

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Hi Kathrin,

I was interested to read your reply as this is something we are thinking about for a specific mandatory training course.

I would like to know how the course completion is managed, if there is a topic that only a specific audience needs to complete does the course still show as fully complete for those learners who are not in the the specific audience group.

Sue

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Hi Sue,

we did not find a solution for it, this is why we only provide additional non-mandatory materials for the special audience.

If you choose "ALL" activities must be completed, then no - the course would not show fully complete for those users who are in the specific audience group.

If you choose "ANY" activity to be completed, it means from all the required activities the learner is free to choose one. Of course, this is not ideal, if you have more than one required activity, or if the users from the specific audience can also see the other activities.

If we really need to track completion for a specific audience/content, we usually create a new course.

Kind regards
Kathrin

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Kia ora Kathrin,

If you have the re-engagement plugin you can use it to set AND/OR completion criteria for the course.

Join the conversation - Completion criteria with AND with subset of OR

I'm not sure if it would work in this case as I haven't tried setting it based on audience.

Ngā mihi,

Larry

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Thank you Larry, for sharing! We will definitely look into it, as this plugin could be interesting for managing complex learning pathways inside courses and would also allow notifications being sent to learners, which is something else we are looking for.

While the reenagement plugin supports the configuration of and/or completion criteria on activity level, in the end there is again only one single course completion criteria. Consequently, for learners the progress bars "suddenly" jump from 0% to 100%, without any indication of the in between progress - something which our learners find motivating, especially in courses with many activities.

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Yes, we often have the same completion jump from 0% to 100% which I agree can be quite jarring.

If you are in V19 I suppose you could use a combination of an activity completion report and use that to show your learners their progress via the reporting block and the course completion block.

For the reporting block it would require multiple blocks and a saved report for each completion required and then displayed again based on audience.

Not sure if that activity report can be graphically displayed though.

And it does seem like a lot of work.

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