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Can you make courses available for self-enrollment by certain groups, but not by using the "courses catalog"?

  • 25 January 2023
  • 4 replies
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Hi there!  

I’m struggling with a set up issue and wondering if someone in the community can help? 

I’ve done a 3-minute screen recording to show the issue to our account rep, but they’re not available this week. 

https://somup.com/c0VTFsxT5i

For additional context, we want the majority of our 600 courses to be searchable by all employees for self-enrollment, and then a select few courses that are only searchable for self-enrollment by a specific group of people, such as managers.  I understand there is an ability to require an admin to approve the course enrollment, but I am hoping to not add a time delay on the ability of the user to take the course.  

If anyone has some great ideas on how to accomplish this without using the course catalogues, please let me know!  

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Best answer by treedy 26 January 2023, 00:06

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Userlevel 4

Hi Treedy, we have that issue and we have broken out the content into catalogs based on the role or employee level.

Catalogs are the way to control who has access to content. Catalogs don’t need to be visible in the scrollable bar (like you show in your video) because as soon as the content is in a catalog that is assigned to a Group/audience, they will be able to search for it, especially at the top-level search, on the top of the page.

How you want people to see the content is a UX/UI issue, related to the managing access through Catalogs. 

Content that’s available to

  • Everyone is in one Catalog and there is a matching Group for All Employees
  • Managers Only in a Managers Catalog and then the Group assigned is managers with specific job level/codes
  • People in certain regions of the world who have different region-based learnings are in Catalogs and Groups based on their job codes and regions.

It actually isn’t difficult, and keeping a spreadsheet to track these is useful and time-saving later when one must review things. We have 101 catalogs—and growing—on our platform so I understand that it is time-consuming to set up.

Background: We have an enterprise platform and there is one admin per domain, so we don’t have lots of staffing to managing these things, but we do have managers who are understanding and we prioritize. The LMS isn’t built in a day ;) We came from no existing platform; It’s just two years and we finally hours set up pretty much the way we envisioned but it’s a moving target.

I’m happy to help if there’s more I can offer.

 

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Thanks @TrishAH - I’m hoping to not use the catalogues option until there is a more intuitive way for the users to be able to see all of the content available to them.  The feedback we received most often when we had catalogues set up is that our users weren’t able to find the course they were looking for and they often got discouraged and stopped trying… it’s a bit of a user education piece but the feedback has been that the format we’re currently using without organizing by catalogues has been easier to navigate and more intuitive. I may look to use the admin approval function for specific course enrollments if there isn’t any other solutions, but hoping there’s a possible set up option that I haven’t considered.  Appreciate your reply! :)   

Userlevel 4

 

 

 

@treedy  I understand what you are saying. The Catalogs serve to provide access, but the number of items in a Catalog can be daunting to search, even if one has used the Additional Fields and people know how to use filters. (Our people don’t seem to use them.)

We use a lot of learning plans to organize content, which are good for eLearning and videos. Even though they seem “required” our base use learning plans more like “serving suggestions” of related materials on a topic and watch only the ones they choose too.

As I mentioned, I use catalogs for discrete organization too, which is why we have so many. In some places I use them as organizational/design elements as in this situation where it’s used like a timeline: Step 1-2-3. (Top) However if the person doesn’t belong to the Group with access (bottom) they don’t see the content. Also, this page is on a specific menu, that only a specific audience can see, which is also based on Groups.

All of this gets deep very quickly, but it’s very cool once you have it working.

 

 

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Whoo hooo! Solution found! 

  • Ended up setting up the catalogues assigned to the specific groups (one with all of the courses including those for managers/supervisors, and then other with all of the courses (minus the ones for the manager/supervisor audience only).
  • Then created different catalogue pages and menus for those groups,
  • The key thing that I wasn’t seeing was the ability to toggle on the “card” display rather than “stream” set up for the catalogue when you select one custom catalogue to be viewable within the page.   

 

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