Can a course be a pre-requisite for another course?

Hi @JamieMcG!  

Have you tried to see if you can find your solution in the “advanced settings”, under “course management”?

You can enroll specific users to a course and only allow to them the visibility. You can also add different training materials to one single course and set-up a sequential navigation policy. 

You can also play around with groups & the enrollment rules.

ex: once a user finishes course 1 he will be enrolled in course 2. 

I hope this helps! 

Thanks @Jihane! These are good ideas! Unfortunately, these are courses which people from the general public purchase, so I can’t enroll manually. :-( Because they are also paid, I can’t automatically enroll people automatically into a course at the next Level. It’s a bit tricky!

Hey @JamieMcG 

Just tossing some ideas out there, not sure if it would work, but thought I would share how I would tackle this (we sell courses to the public as well).  What if instead of using the Catalogs for users to find their courses, what if you used pages.  Have users fall into specific groups based on course completion. Then when they complete a course they are assigned to a new group and then set page visibility based on the group the user belongs. 

So link the first course on a page that is visible to everyone.  Then maybe have the page say something like “To unlock courses 2 and 3 you must complete xyz.”  Once a user completes the course, they could be automatically placed into a group for all those who completed the first course, and then those folks maybe have access to a page links them to both course 1 and 2 where they would then be allowed to purchase the second course? Then do the same for the third course?

The only downside is the user might need to log out and log back in to be able to see new pages based no the group they are assigned.  

Again, this is me thinking out loud, maybe help you with some ideas.  A docebian might have a way better solution.

Hello, for the use case you described, the best and easiest way to do this is through a learning plan. In the learning plan you add the courses that you want, in the order you want, and then can add a prereq to each course in the learning plan itself.

@MarkMBT has the right idea in terms of pre-req’s for courses, especially if you have enough content/LO’s on the subject that it doesn’t make sense to pre-req inside the course itself.

@JamieMcG - A Learning Plan will offer you the option to nest courses within, as well as set up rules regarding progression forward to the next course in the set.  Some or all courses in the LP could be set with pre-requisite options.  Clicking on the “chain” icon, next to any Learning Plan, you’ll be able to set the rules up. 

Here’s a quick screen grab and a solid KB article with all the extra details:

@JamieMcG This is probably not the best option for you but I thought I’d share anyway in the case it sparked an idea for you.

We have some pre-reqs (or best if you take this course before another). We added a training object slide as the first slide in the course that says something like “STOP! Have you taken ____? If not, click here to complete ___ before beginning this course.” The pre-req is also listed in the course description, so it’s seen before being enrolled in as well. 

Just an option if your pre-req are more of a suggestion like ours. 

Following along with you on this! Would love Docebo to develop a pre-req setting outside of Learning Plans.

@John Thanks for this! My issue with Learning Plans is that you have to purchase the whole thing, right? My users only pay and enroll for one course at a time. (And may never take the higher level courses depending on their stage of development.) Not sure how to make that work within Learning Plans...

@Annarose.Peterson Thank you for this idea… I hadn’t thought of using pages in this way but it sounds like a possible workaround. I wasn’t aware that you can show different catalogs on different pages? Will investigate further! Thank you.

Hi @JamieMcG! I have to start by thanking you for sharing this post. I honestly have probably read this entire thread 8-9 times and feel a bit like Sherlock Holmes trying to crack this case. I am confident that the community can help you solve this one! Let’s do this…

As @MarkMBT and @John both shared, it seems that Learning Plans might in fact be the best way to go to meet your complex pricing & sequence needs. I know you mentioned not being able to use Learning Plans since the courses are paid, but I wanted to throw out a few other Docebo capabilities hoping that they might help you with your use case.

Allow learners to purchase single courses inside a Learning Plan

The Putting Learning Plans On Sale section of this knowledge article, shows you how to allow learners to purchase individual courses within a learning plan rather than purchasing the entire learning plan itself. This might be one way to set courses as pre-requisites, but not force a learner to purchase all courses within a learning plan. There may be still be some limited functionality if learners later decide they want to complete the entire learning plan, so I encourage you to test the behavior of this setting thoroughly.

Use Channels on a page to “reveal” learner’s enrolled courses on a page

You mentioned wanting to “restrict visibility or enrollment into a course at the course level”. One way that you might be able to achieve this is through Channels. Channels behave slightly differently than catalogs when it comes to courses. Only courses into which a learner is enrolled will display in a Channel they’re assigned. This means that you could add a Channel Widget on a page that includes a Topic X Channel with, let’s say, courses Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 from Topic X. Let’s pretend, then, that you also have a Catalog widget just above that Channel widget that incldues a single paid Learning Plan for Topic X, with courses Level 1-3 all in a sequence inside that learning plan and available for purchase individually. If I, as a learner, decided to only purchase courses Level 1 and Level 2, then only those two courses would display in the Topic X Channel on that page and I would still have no way to access Course Level 3 (unless I went back to the LP and purchased it later).

I absolutely love how complex and specific this use case is. To me, these are the most fun challenges to try to tackle within Docebo! If these recommendations still haven’t helped crack your case, please let us know so we can continue thinking through this together. The more info you provide the community, the better equipped we’ll be to help!

I will end by sharing that if you continue to run into obstacles trying to accomplish exactly what you outlined in the original post, you may want to consider making a few exceptions to your use case. Two that come to mind most immediately are:

1. Leave the inherent order of the courses up to your learners to determine. If you clearly name the courses in a sequential order like 1, 2, 3, your learners may understand that inherent order without you needing to “force” them through a specific sequence. This could help make the ecommerce piece easier for you, but may also cause other concerns I’m not aware of with the context given. Just a thought!
2. Consider bundling the courses in Learning Plans at a fixed price. You mentioned that “learners don’t have to necessarily do all levels”. Could learners still benefit from taking all courses? If so, it might actually help your strategy if you require learners to purchse all courses in an LP rather than letting them pick and choose so that they have more skin in the game to complete them all. Alternatively, you could “average” the price of your learning plans such that it becomes equally economical for someone who may only want to take one course as someone who may want to take all of them.

Thanks @Adam Ballhaussen for the time you’ve taken to help me out and consider the problem!

It’s possible that we can make the “users decide which course to buy” option work; I assume you can still use the pre-requisites function so that the person is in effect “forced” to buy L1 first and L1 only, because the others are not available yet?

My larger issue, I think, is that I need to force people to select a session when buying Level 1, and this only really works when the person is buying the ILT course, not when a person is buying a Learning Plan. Just because of the way Docebo steps people through each process.  

I know my use case is weird, we’re a sport and our hands are tied in some respects because of our world governing body’s regulations as to who can take what course and when.

I am thinking of two ‘ideas’, but not sure I have worked out my logins yet to the ideas portal:

1) Have an option to force session selection at time of purchase (for both Courses and LP’s with ILT Courses, and 

2) Be able to restrict Courses to various Branches/Users/Groups, rather than only be able to restrict these at the Catalog level.

Thanks again!

@JamieMcG that makes perfect sense. I really love both of the ideas you shared! Here’s an article that might help you access the Ideas Portal. You can access it via the communication center within your Docebo platform. I encourage you to post your ideas there!

Dear community, my question is related to the above conversation - I’m looking for a way to visualize an e2e learning path for our learners.

Something like - 1st widget to be used for Level 1 courses, once you complete the L1 courses you are moving to the L2 widget or maybe by catalogs as advised above.

I’m trying to think about a nice way to lay it out in a visualized way, so it will be easy for the learner to understand where he/she is now, and what is the next course/LP to take, and what is the end point (Level 3). The entire end-to-end flow. I would appreciate if you can share ideas and screenshots of your pages.

Thank you so much!

Hi everyone,

Great discussions and problem solving together. I work with a lot of other LMS admins that use different LMS platforms and in those platforms they can easily make a course in any catalogue, grouping, a pre-requisite course before enrolling in another. It is pretty simple logical requirement in my opinion and we shouldn’t have to be looking for tricky clever ways to solve this basic requirement.

I’ve had to use learning plans to achieve something that I feel is quite straight forward logic within a LMS that allows people to browse and select from a catalogue of courses. Yes, Learning Plans have a place and can solve part of this but are not able to cater for complex mixes of possibilities with course selection. It also means you need to have make a LP for each combination of pre-requisites you wish to include and is in my opinion extra work for everyone including the Learners having to work it out.

I am a huge fan and champion of Docebo Learn, but I just cannot understand why something so obvious like a pre-requisite course logic isn’t part of its core, within courses. In addition to this, and related, some form of workflow for enrolment approvals with one or two stage approvals is needed to support this area. All those admins I mention would swap over to Docebo Learn having seen what it can do, but the course pre-requisite and enrolment approval workflows are deal breakers for all of them. :-( 

PS: Learning plan management is clunky, limited, difficult and desperately needs attention. I was aware work is being done on it and I feel it is an essential part of the core offering within Docebo Learn - any news on work to improve it? Just saying, none of the recent updates in my opinion are more important than fixing up learning plans, maybe that is just me.

I like the pending updates to Learning Plans! 

jckemv has a point, course prerequisites should be a standard feature. Docebo needs to figure out the technical issues. Maybe they could build in more flexibility to the My Courses and LP page to address the use cases.

We have replaced the menu item with a custom page in our instance because we cannot edit the default page and wanted to hide courses that are part of an assigned learning plan as it is confusing to the learners. Unfortunately, if users navigate using the back button they get to My Courses and LP page. 

Hi @riccardogalimberti 

Very exciting the hear about the forthcoming enhancements to LPs. This will make a dramatic difference!

In terms of the learner experience, one major sticking point at the moment is the inability to filter LPs in a catalogue using the Course Additional Fields. So if you have a mix of Courses and LPs in a catalogue, as soon as you select one filter option, all LPs vanish, even if the Courses contained within match the filter criteria.  Do you know whether this is being addressed in the LP enhancements pipeline? 

Many thanks!

Alan

Hi @riccardogalimberti 

Do you know when the Learning Plan enhancements will be available? 

I really hope the learning plan usability enhancements can make it into the mix really soon, especially the admin interface which is so hard to use currently.

It is still a bit early to commit to a specific date. What I can tell you is that the development team will start the technical activities in the first days of next year and we believe that the activities will last for a few months. We hope to be able to release between the end of Q2 and the beginning of Q3 next year. However, keep in mind that this is a general indication and is always subject to change.

Barely a year into the platform and this question has been asked of me quite a lot lately. We have learning plans with prerequisites, but we don’t want to make a learning plan for every instance where various audiences will be taking the course. 

This would be a great feature enhancement.

Hi @riccardogalimberti,
As we are concluding Q3 (with an estimated release as you stated “end of Q2 and the beginning of Q3) any update on the delivery of this promised and highly-nedded set of features?

(cc: @Jihane)

Hello everyone,

we have this Idea in our Community related to this topic:

I would recommend following, upvoting and adding any additional feedback in that thread.

I just shared an update in the linked Idea, our Voice of the Customer team will investigate this. We will keep the Idea thread updated with any other information.

Hello! I know this is an old thread, but I’m wondering if have progress has been made on the learning plan updates and if there’s a timeline?