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We’re excited to provide you with the latest updates on our ongoing Certification initiative!

 

 

General updates

Over the past few months, we’ve made significant progress in refining the scope of each milestone for this initiative. We’ve confirmed both the overall strategy and the key features to be delivered with each milestone, ensuring a phased approach that delivers continuous value while staying aligned with the broader goals.

 

Building the Foundation: Started development on Milestone 1

We’ve officially kicked off development on the first milestone, which is focused on laying the foundation for the new certification and retraining system. This milestone is essential for boosting learner experience and enabling automation of the recertification and retraining process in the next milestone. The key improvements being introduced centre around enhancements to Learning Plans (LPs), specifically:

  • Persistent completion status: This ensures that learners' completion records are retained, even after updates or changes to the LP, and that enrollment status is preserved.
  • Archiving and re-enrollment functionalities: These features allow for the archiving of enrollment records and seamless re-enrollment when learners need to retrain. This is essential for supporting future automation of certification renewals and ongoing training cycles.

 

Design Finalized for the First Release of the New Certification

We’ve completed the design for the first release of the new certification features, covering the majority of the "must-have" and "should-have" capabilities we’ve outlined. A key enhancement in this release is treating certifications as standalone training entities, which will greatly improve the learner experience by preventing unintended actions.

Additionally, the renewal flow will be automated via the renewal window, simplifying and streamlining the recertification management process.

 

Milestones explained 

Milestones 1| Learning plan extension to support certifications use cases

Following our approach to have the certification as a specific type of learning plan, milestone 1 focuses on essential improvements to Learning Plans (LPs) that will establish a solid foundation for future advancements in certification and retraining processes. While this milestone does not yet incorporate Automated Recertification Flow, it is a critical step toward enabling these features in subsequent phases.

With this milestone, we aim to achieve the following:

  • Persistent Completion Status: Learning Plans will now retain the learner’s completion status, ensuring that their progress will remain consistent and visible also across retraining cycles.
  • The archive of the enrollments: Enrollment records in the Learning Plan will be archived, providing better management of historical data. This is also the foundation for an automatic archiving and re-enrollment process during retraining. 

These enhancements will pave the way for the automated recertification and renewal processes planned for Milestone 2, ultimately improving the overall learning plan and certification experience.

 

Milestones 2-3 | Certifications as an extension of the learning plan

Differently from what was communicated in the previous update, we have decided to merge Milestones 2 and 3, and we’ll be introducing the automatic renewal flow in this phase to maximize value from the start. Please note that the possibility to define a different training path for the renewal will be achieved in a following milestone. 

In this milestone, Certifications will be seamlessly integrated as extensions of the Learning Plans, transforming them into standalone training entities. This enhancement is designed to boost both administrative capabilities and the overall learner experience.

Key achievements in this milestone will include:

  • Certification as a Standalone Training Entity: Certifications will now function independently, allowing to enroll learners directly in certifications with their own specific enrollment dates, no longer tied to different course enrollment.
  • Enhanced Learner Experience: Certifications will be listed alongside courses and learning plans, providing a unified view. Information like "close to expiration" will be clearly displayed, with a strong emphasis on avoiding confusion between renewing a certification and just retaking its training.
  • Improvements in Dates Management: New configuration options include the ability to set absolute expiration dates and define renewal windows, ensuring more flexible and accurate management of certification timelines.
  • Automated Renewal Process: The introduction of the renewal window is key to automating the renewal process. Once the renewal window opens, the system will automatically archive the learner’s previous enrollment and re-enroll them.
  • AND Logic for Certification Attainment: Certifications can now require the completion of multiple courses for attainment, introducing more complex learning paths and requirements.
  • APIs and Webhooks: New APIs and webhooks will allow for deeper integrations and customization, enhancing connectivity with other systems.

 

Milestones 4-5 | Migration and GA

In this crucial phase, we will set everything in place to enable the full production adoption of the new certification system. Our focus will be on migrating legacy certifications and their associated awards, ensuring a smooth transition. This migration will allow the adoption of new features while preserving historical data, enabling users to seamlessly leverage past records.

We will also introduce several enhancements to improve both functionality and user experience, including:

  • Power User General Permission: Expanding control and management capabilities for designated users.
  • Certification Additional Fields: Adding flexibility to accommodate more specific certification details.

These updates will ensure that the new features are fully functional and backward-compatible, setting the stage for the release process.

 

Following milestones 

Our initial release of the new certification system is designed to meet the needs of our users by covering 100% of the "must-have" features, 50% of the "should-have" features, and 40% of the "could-have" features. However, we understand that certain functionalities are critical for specific use cases. With that in mind, we are actively planning the subsequent milestones to address these essential requirements:

  • Enrollment Automation: This feature will streamline the process of enrolling and unenrolling users from certifications, ensuring a smoother experience for both administrators and learners.
  • Dedicated Renewal Path: We will implement a feature that allows organizations to define unique paths for renewing certifications,
  • Power User (PU) Specific Permissions: To enhance the management of certifications, we’ll introduce granular permissions for Power Users, allowing for more precise control over access and actions related to certification management.
  • Catalog-Based Certifications: This capability will enable the organization of certifications into catalogs, facilitating easier navigation and access. 
  • Credits-Based completion: to allow administrators to define completion logic based on number of credits
  • Certifications and LPs Categories: to allow content categorization following what is already available in courses.

 

Conclusion

Each milestone is designed to build upon the last, ensuring incremental progress that provides real value to both learners and administrators.

As we advance, your feedback remains invaluable. This phased approach is intended to create a certification solution that is not only comprehensive and effective today but flexible and adaptive for the future. Thank you for your involvement and support as we work together to bring this vision to life!

 

So very excited for these updates! These will vastly improve our ability to track and maintain compliance in a variety of ways for different areas.

Thank you again for all of the hard work you do on behalf of customer feedback. 

This is certainly exciting! Is there an expected timeline associated with each of these milestones?

So nice. 

  • Persistent completion status: This ensures that learners' completion records are retained, even after updates or changes to the LP, and that enrollment status is preserved.
  • Archiving and re-enrollment functionalities: These features allow for the archiving of enrollment records and seamless re-enrollment when learners need to retrain. This is essential for supporting future automation of certification renewals and ongoing training cycles.

 

Design Finalized for the First Release of the New Certification

We’ve completed the design for the first release of the new certification features, covering the majority of the "must-have" and "should-have" capabilities we’ve outlined. A key enhancement in this release is treating certifications as standalone training entities, which will greatly improve the learner experience by preventing unintended actions.

Additionally, the renewal flow will be automated via the renewal window, simplifying and streamlining the recertification management process.

 

A quick question - persistent completion status is important in terms of using an LP as a shell for certifications - no doubt. But that flexibility of changing status based on the contained courses is still key to other use cases with LPs. Will this an option for the LP? Or is this now a new LP behavior all together?

@Nicolo Malinverno this is all great stuff but there’s one BIG issue I still dont see any updates on…

When we archive a course that has test data, or a survey or a SCORM object that contains a test, once we archive that enrolment, we have no access to the the test details, survey responses and SCORM data...Will this ever be resolved? It is a serious flaw in the archiving process that severely limits its use for our use cases.

Any updates are appreciated. Thx

Fantastic stuff Multiple item completion to obtaina certification is high on our list.

Two questions I know were addressed but I can’t find

  1. Is this a module or part of the core system?
  2. Is there a timeline for launch?
  • Persistent completion status: This ensures that learners' completion records are retained, even after updates or changes to the LP, and that enrollment status is preserved.
  • Archiving and re-enrollment functionalities: These features allow for the archiving of enrollment records and seamless re-enrollment when learners need to retrain. This is essential for supporting future automation of certification renewals and ongoing training cycles.

Where a learner LP has a completed status and changes are made to the LP i.e. further courses added, will the completed status be retained or does the enrolment status then then change to In Progress?

The certification is a must have, as this is needed as evidence of prior completion, but preserving the enrolment status when changes such as this are made to the LP, will cause issues.

Thanks

Thank you for the update. Could you share the estimated timelines associated with these milestones? Many thanks,

Aimee 

hi. 

I hope part of the certification retraining will involve automatic reenrollment of users to the certifying course / LP once a certification is expired.

This is essential for better management of regulatory trainings when users need to have the same training once in a period of time.

thanks.

Ben.

Hi everybody,

Thank you for your interest. Below are some additional details.


Learning plan persistent completion:
Whenever an admin adds a new course to the learning plan, the system will prompt the admin to choose whether to maintain the current completion status of learners or recalculate it. Recalculating means the system will update the completion status based on the learners' actual progress across all courses in the LP, including the newly added ones. This option will also be available for specific groups and branches.

​@dklinger ​@joanne.gerard 

Evidence of prior completion for certifications

Certification history will be managed through the enrollment archiving and re-enrollment process. A retraining will always trigger the archiving of the previous enrollment (and its certification informations) and the re-enrollment.

​@joanne.gerard 

Automatic re-enrollemnt 

The archive and re-enroll process will be automatically triggered either by the opening of the renewal window (an administrator-defined timeframe prior to expiration) or by the expiration date itself, if no renewal window is defined.

​@benzion 

improvement on the archived information

While we recognize the need to improve this functionality, we do not plan to increase the amount of archived information during the archiving process at this stage. Our focus is on the certification initiative for now and deliver value as soon as possible. This enhancement might be considered for a future release or as part of a parallel initiative later next year.

​@lrnlab 

Timeframe

The certification initiative is our top priority for next year, and the team is already working on it. Given the scope of the initiative, we plan to roll out features progressively throughout next year’s planned releases.

 

tnx

NM

 

 

​@Nicolo Malinverno - Thank you very much for going out of your way to help describe some of the newer behaviors we can expect to see.

There are alot of pieces to the puzzle for this one - I seriously appreciate how you are looking at this. We hope that we can see up to Phase 3 by next year so that we can put the work into use.

​@Nicolo Malinverno This is all great news. I looked through the posts above and apologize if this has been answered

 

  1. When are the planed phase launches?
  2. What module are these features located in? Do we need to buy something other than the core system to use them?

This is great news! 

Also, will the Learn App also get updated and allow learners to certify and recertify.

Ad hoc completions:

  • Will there still be the ability for learners to self-archive and complete the training again? 
  • Will Power users have the ability to auto-archive completions for an entire team and ask them to complete the training again?

 

​@Davefox 

  • the feature will be managed in continuity with the current one, so it will be in the core system. 

​@Vijay 

  • yes, the learner flow will be improved but will follow the current behaviour 
  • yes, PU (with proper permission and resources) will be able to trigger the archive and re-enrollment process

​@dklinger 

  • You're right, this does seem like a puzzle! That's why our goal is to keep sharing information and updates, so that when we start rolling out releases, it won't feel like something dropping out of the sky. Instead, there will have already been some time to get familiar with it.

This all looks great and will save our admin team a huge amount of time.  Can I ask a question (and apologies if this has been covered).  Does the certification occur regardless of the enrolment status?  ie we will have some users that have not completed the module but as a prompt we would want to re-certify them.  Will this be possible?

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