I’ve been struggling with the new-ish course player when using Learning Plans and decided to reach out for help. For my use case, Learning Plans fit a very particular need. I use LPs for large courses - it breaks them up into smaller bites (usually 3-4 e-learnings). It’s worked well so far. The old course player wasn’t great, but we added some directions to the end of our SCORM files and were able to assist our customers with navigation.
Now, I don’t even know what to say. Let me outline the most immediate issues:
Navigating to next course: there is a small, rounded button near the top of the screen with the LP title on it. This is supposed to take the learner back to the course overview page. It’s well-hidden at the top of the page. Also, when I complete a course in my learner account, that button doesn’t appear immediately. I’m on the completion page, but I have nowhere to go. (screenshots of page attached)
I do not see a “Go to next course” button. I’ve searched other community posts and it seems this is available to others. There must be an LP or course setting I am missing.
Retake the course: this button seems nice but it resets the learner’s progress. There’s no real need for this button if the navigation is set to free and the user can go back anytime and look at the content again. I’d like to be able to hide this, but I can’t use CSS code to do it. My company won’t allow it.
To say I’m frustrated and disappointed with the new course player is a serious understatement. The layout may be cleaner but its far from intuitive. Any help is deeply appreciated.
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Hi @CDoerger the pics you added are for courses...did you mean to add pics of your LP instead?
When I tested the LP with the new player, I find the screen views to be intuitive and do allow the user to move to the next course as needed...
Is this what you are looking for?
Hi, thanks for responding! The screenshots are from the course inside the learning plan. I wish I hadn’t cropped out the progress bar along the top, but I did. That’s the confusing part for me….it looks like a regular course page. Now, when I go back in after signing out I see the rounded button at the top that points the learner back to the overview page. However, I still don’t see a Go to Next Course button.
The other thing I’ve noticed is when I hit Play on the third course in the series, it asks me if I want to ‘resume where I left off’ and I have to click that button before I can start the course. Makes no sense to hit the Play button and have to hit a second button to start the course.
If you turn on “Focus Mode” in the Learning Plan Player settings, you will get a “Previous Course” and “Next Course” option at the top of the screen for courses that have only one lesson. If there is more than one lesson, you will see a combination of “Previous/Next Lesson” and “Previous/Next Course” buttons.
When not in Focus Mode, there is a drop-down menu that allows you to review all of the available courses in the learning plan with their statuses, and you can choose which course to view next:
Upon completing the course when not in Focus Mode, I see what @CDoerger showed, above.
Hope this helps!
We are also using the focus mode as explained by @JGildea. This is a change for our users, but it makes it easier to navigate within a learning plan without having to go back to the main learning plan page after every courses.
The explanation is very good. I just wanted to add that you can change this setting for every content on your platform (Configure branding and look > Course player > Enable the focus mode for all content)...
...or on individual learning plan (Player > Enable custom focus mode for the courses of this learning plan)
We’ve decided to enable focus mode for all learning plans and courses on the platform to reduce the clicks before accessing content.
I hope this helps!
One of the things we found with the new player not using focus mode that is confusing are the following behaviors
If a course has multiple training materials, there is no longer a clearly defined “NEXT” button. To tell the user to look at the next material. This caused us to have to change the end points in most of our SCORM material explaining how a user should proceed.
If the course is part of a learning plan AND the training materials are something other than SCORM or video. When the user goes to view them, they “play” for about 3 seconds and then get marked complete and then the system sends the user back to the learning plan with the course marked complete.
As we use HTML objects at the end of many course to add additional information and links, this means the user does not have a chance to see them and has to reopen the course to view them.
The super fun part that makes this hard to troubleshoot or even show to other people is it only happens the FIST time someone views the materials. So if you see it and then try to go back and see it again, you won’t. You open each material and can view it as long as you want.
What we are finding is that user never views the material because they are marked complete in the class so they don’t go back, they just think it was an error.
An alternative to the Focus mode is using the Theater mode. You can then enable the “previous” and “next” button:
To achieve this, you can go in your course properties and choose “Player”, then under “Theater mode navigation” you can click on “Show internal navigation buttons”:
This setting can also be changed globally under “Configure branding and look” under “Course Player”:
You can disable the redirect behavior of learning plans in the Advanced Settings under Learning Plans:
However, this applies then to all learning plans, so I don’t know if it applies to your specific use case.
I hope this helps!
Thanks to every single one of you who responded. This is awesome news - Focus Mode works for us. We now have the Learning Plan in Focus Mode and the ‘sub-courses’ not in Focus Mode. We’ll play around with this feature a little more and see how it affects single courses that live outside of a learning plan.
Someone also mentioned to ‘Show internal navigation buttons.’ We’ve turned this off for courses with SCORM files because we use sequential navigation to force users through a specific progression. When we enable the internal nav buttons it will show a ‘next button’ but users get upset because the window pops up and tells them they can’t proceed until they complete the prerequisite course (or something to that effect.) So, it was more confusing than anything.
Thanks so much to everyone! You guys are the best.
