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I’m testing enrollment validity periods with learning plans in an effort to use the Learning plan enrollment expiring notification. I’m trying to set the validity end date as far out as possible. I want it to be years away. On August 1, I set the validity period to 8,000 days for a learning plan. On August 5, I discovered the learner I enrolled on August 1 had their validity end date set to 12/31/2037, which is 4,900 days. Today, I have tried various things and every enrollment end date ends up being set to 12/31/2037, which is 4,896 days from August 5. It will not exceed this date. It appears 12/31/2037 is the farthest date I can use for a validity end date. Does anyone know when validity end dates can be set beyond 12/31/2037?

Here’s more details in case anyone has another idea that will achieve what I want.

We enroll new employees in a learning plan on their first day. They receive the User has been enrolled in a learning plan notification at the time of their enrollment. We would like to send them another email about the learning plan about one week from their start date. The only time options for the User has been enrolled in a learning plan notification is at time of, so we cannot create another User has been enrolled in a learning plan notification with a different time trigger.

The only learning plan notification we can send at a specific time seems to be the Learning plan enrollment expiring. Because this notification requires validity dates for the learning plan, I’m trying to set them as far out as possible since we don’t really want a validity period for the learning plan. I thought I could then set the notification to be sent one week prior to the farthest validity period I could set, thinking I could set the validity thousands of days out. I didn’t realize I couldn’t set validity periods beyond 12/31/2037.

I would love any insight on validity end dates or suggestions for a way to send a notification one week after the learning plan enrollment.

Since you don’t really want a validity date, ultimately, I would personally suggest looking into a notification like “Digest: Learner Has Yet to Complete a Course.”  While this isn’t technically a “Learning Plan” notification, you could set it up using only the courses that are contained in the new hire learning plan, and customize the language in the messaging to be something like, “these courses are part of your new hire learning plan and should be completed ASAP.”

 

Since it’s a Digest, they’ll only get one email about it on whatever cadence you set.  You can set it weekly, monthly, daily, etc.  It will include direct links to the courses themselves rather than the learning plan shell, but I don’t see that as a problem.  It will also ONLY remind them to complete the courses they haven’t completed yet.  So if they have done three out of six courses already, it will only remind them to complete the remaining three courses.  Once all courses are complete, they’ll stop getting the reminders on the cadence that is set, and you won’t have to worry about validity dates at all and can remove that from the equation.

@kjanderson - good morning.

@trose23 is spot on.

Unfortunately - the validity dates with LPs will feel like they have multiple challenges. 
Most important is when the validity date closes, you will land up with people locked out of courses - meaning you will find yourself resetting validity dates or even establishing remediation course - and it is a type of hot mess that is a lot more complex that the story needs to be.

It is better to set validity and use the ability to have soft deadlines with courses and digest notifications to get to a sweet spot that I think you are after.

@trose23 and @dklinger, thank you for the suggestions. I will look at the Digest: Learner Has Yet to Complete a Course notification a little more to see if I can make it work the way we want. We really want the notification to be a reminder about the learning plan, how to access it, and information about its completion as employees have options regarding which of some of the courses in the learning plan that they complete. We aren’t really wanting the notification to provide a list of courses not completed.

I really don’t want to work with validity dates. I was trying it to see if I could make a notification meet our needs.

@kjanderson - in this case - I think you are going to love the digest.

A few tips:

  • Remove all the text from the template to start
  • The digest does have fewer short codes, but we find that they can do just fine
  • We game the digest notification with the autoenrollment link for the LP when necessary and we dont bother using the items shortcode/tags.
  • Try to avoid naming conventions that involve the same name in the LP and Course - we get feedback on our LP being the same name as the content inside of it at times and containing other learning as well...leaving a small percentage of people saying: “Well, I already did it”.

 

Thanks for the tips, @dklinger. I’ve used the digest for something else and it works perfectly. I hadn’t wrapped my head around using it for this partially because other staff have the option to self-enroll in this learning plan. I was trying to work out if I could prevent them from receiving the notification. Having something that doesn’t use validity dates is much better.

Thanks for the tips, @dklinger. I’ve used the digest for something else and it works perfectly. I hadn’t wrapped my head around using it for this partially because other staff have the option to self-enroll in this learning plan. I was trying to work out if I could prevent them from receiving the notification. Having something that doesn’t use validity dates is much better.

It’s a plus that all of these notifications are customizable!

You can always leave out the courses that are optional for everyone so they aren’t included in the notification reminder. It may be worthwhile to add disclaimers to the latter part of the message that if they enrolled in the course individually or if they enrolled in the LP voluntarily that other parts of the message may not apply to them/they can disregard the reminder.  Sometimes when courses/LPs have flexible enrollments notifications can be difficult to make one-size-fits-all messaging, but hopefully you can get close!

@kjanderson

You can - it can be a little messier, but you may want to consider this as a proposal for a configuration:

  • you can scope your notifications to a group
    • In theory, you can change the scope of a group to seeing something in a catalog widget on page by leveraging groups a little more
    • meaning you can actually block a person that has enrolled from seeing it and triggering an enrollment
  • if you create a LP that is “public” that people can self-enroll to and a second that is only used for your pushes, then you are in good shape

The only related risk/”cost” is if you have a few folks reporting out on those learning plans? It can be confusing to them which one is related to which target for the report.

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