How do you make "Days of Validity" in an Learning Plan work like a hard due date with a soft deadline?

  • 4 March 2024
  • 7 replies
  • 92 views
C
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Creative thinkers & loophole finders wanted - this problem is for you!!!! 😁

We have ~80 quarterly learning plans, distributed among four business lines. They are assigned to very specific combinations of groups and branches. These are all required, compliance-related courses that are sectioned into quarters for reporting purposes but are available for the full calendar year for those that want to work ahead.

We are trying to get the LPs to function with due dates tied to a specific day - such as 3/31 for the end of Q1. We want the courses to show as overdue if not completed by 3/31, yet still allow access to complete the courses after the fact. LPs don’t have the same customization that you do in Course Management (like validity periods, validity day start/end, and soft deadlines), so we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

We are finding that we can’t use the “After being enrolled in a course” selection for the days of validity because of the downwind effect for new hires (who also get enrolled into these plans). See the example below:

  • 100 existing staff are enrolled in Q1 LP with 90 days to complete, making the LP effectively due 3/31
  • Little Bo Peep is hired on March 27th, 2024, getting enrolled into that same plan with that same 90 days to complete - meaning hers aren’t due until July 21st, 2024.
  • This snowballs into her remaining quarters as well- 

Q1 due July 21st, 2024

Q2 due Nov. 14th, 2024

Q3 due March 9th, 2025

Q4 due July 3, 2025

  • We are highly regulatory- and compliance-driven, so this scenario is absolute anarchy when it comes to reporting. Our staff have to take these courses in one calendar year, so it would also create inconsistency in our expectation/communication to the learners - “it says you aren’t due until March or July 2025, but you actually need them done by 12/31/24.” 

Right now, these are the only two options we see and we do not like either of them 🙃

  1. Forgo the use of learning plans entirely - go course by course. 
    • Enroll learners course by course - this would allow for us to use a validity end date and soft deadline to each course
    • Duplicate the course for non-quarter related training (like if someone wants to upskill and use that course an an elective)
    • Create enrollment rules for every single course instead of LP for new hires
    • We are looking at ~250 courses, with 2-5 groups/branches per course, plus an equivalent amount of enrollment rules. Obviously, the administration on this would be insane. 
  2. Do not use due dates/expiration dates at all.
    • This is what we are doing right now until we figure out a path forward. 
    • It renders My Team effectively useless, because there are never any overdue courses. 
    • We are struggling to figure out how to notify people they actually have courses due in the system. We put “(Due 3/31/24)” in the LP title, but it’s not helping much. On their My Activities->Courses, it shows no expiration date, so it’s confusing for them. 

Is anyone in a similar situation and employing a different solution? Is anyone aware of a different way we could approach it in the system? We are open minded to all solutions!!! 

7 replies

lrnlab
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Userlevel 7
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hmm that’s a tough one...have you tried using the course validity period? I just tried it inside an LP and sadly the date does not show there. Short of using the validity on the LP itself, you might be better of just using courses where you have more control and options. LP settings are quite limited.

A

We have had the same issue, unfortunately. Our workaround has been to edit each individual course’s validity and then put information in the learning plan description that indicates which courses are due when (15 days, 30 days, etc.). We use this for our orientation learning plans, so it is enrollment dependent, not date dependent. We also use the prerequisite functions in learning plans to help group the courses based on the urgency of their validity dates. Learners have to complete all 15-day-validity courses before they can open 30-day-validity courses, etc. It’s not elegant, and it’s a lot of background work to set up, but it’s creating a similar effect to having soft deadlines for learning plans.

C
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hmm that’s a tough one...have you tried using the course validity period? I just tried it inside an LP and sadly the date does not show there. Short of using the validity on the LP itself, you might be better of just using courses where you have more control and options. LP settings are quite limited.

We tried making the setting in each course and then including it in an LP, but the LP overrides anything at the course level.

  • Create validity period in course 1 with soft deadline
  • Create validity period in course 2 with soft deadline
    • Made sure both deadlines worked as designed with test user enrolled in each
  • Add both courses to an LP
  • Enrolled someone in the LP
  • They had no due date :(

We’re hoping to not have to do it at the course level because it’s a complex enrollment matrix with the four different business lines utilizing the same courses. Based on our math, it would take about 3.5 weeks of someone working 40 hours a week to make this transition! 

C
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We have had the same issue, unfortunately. Our workaround has been to edit each individual course’s validity and then put information in the learning plan description that indicates which courses are due when (15 days, 30 days, etc.). We use this for our orientation learning plans, so it is enrollment dependent, not date dependent. We also use the prerequisite functions in learning plans to help group the courses based on the urgency of their validity dates. Learners have to complete all 15-day-validity courses before they can open 30-day-validity courses, etc. It’s not elegant, and it’s a lot of background work to set up, but it’s creating a similar effect to having soft deadlines for learning plans.

That’s tough but good thinking on your part!! I’m thinking about how we could apply the way you approach the new hire situation and I'm wondering how we could manually edit the enrollments for the new hires and not the existing users.

  • How do you go about knowing who you change the individual course validity for? 
    • Do you sort this in the enrollments tab somehow?
  • How often do you go in and manually update the enrollments? 
    • We have ~150 new hires a month, so I'm wondering if you’re doing it on a similar scale and how much time it takes you?
A

We have had the same issue, unfortunately. Our workaround has been to edit each individual course’s validity and then put information in the learning plan description that indicates which courses are due when (15 days, 30 days, etc.). We use this for our orientation learning plans, so it is enrollment dependent, not date dependent. We also use the prerequisite functions in learning plans to help group the courses based on the urgency of their validity dates. Learners have to complete all 15-day-validity courses before they can open 30-day-validity courses, etc. It’s not elegant, and it’s a lot of background work to set up, but it’s creating a similar effect to having soft deadlines for learning plans.

That’s tough but good thinking on your part!! I’m thinking about how we could apply the way you approach the new hire situation and I'm wondering how we could manually edit the enrollments for the new hires and not the existing users.

  • How do you go about knowing who you change the individual course validity for? 
    • Do you sort this in the enrollments tab somehow?
  • How often do you go in and manually update the enrollments? 
    • We have ~150 new hires a month, so I'm wondering if you’re doing it on a similar scale and how much time it takes you?

Each course has a set number of days of validity that applies to everyone who takes it. I’ll admit this has caused some issues for anyone who is not a new hire but gets assigned the course for remediation, etc. because they still have the same timeframe to complete.

Each learning plan is set up with auto enrollments so when someone is hired they are automatically enrolled in a specific learning plan. We do this by using groups. Our groups are set up by job code and cost center combinations, which basically means each job title and the department/unit/team they are in. That set up was somewhat tedious, as we had to determine every job code/cost center pairing and then decide which learning plan applied to them. Then we set up the auto enrollment and left off any deadline or validity period on the learning plan side.

When I first created the system, I had a validity period on the learning plans and it caused all sorts of problems because I didn’t realize it trumped the settings in the individual courses. We’ve remedied this by removing the settings from the learning plan. Instead, we send an email notification to managers (monthly) for any learner who is behind on any of the courses included in the learning plans. It tells them which learner, which course(s) and when they were enrolled. We customized the message to give the overall completion expectation for the learning plan - in this case, 30 days. It is then on the manager to follow up with the employee to get the courses finished.

kfontanini
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We found a resolution for this issue. It’s a very long-winded explanation of how we ultimately approached due dates and learning plans. I posted a walkthrough in Docebo Community in case it benefits others. Here is the link: https://community.docebo.com/ideas/making-use-of-validity-dates-and-learning-plans-10567

For our Docebo Wish List, I’d add a few things:

  • On My Calendar, show course completion status (not started, in progress, complete)
  • On My Calendar, show overdue courses
  • On My Activities>Statistics, show course completion status (not started, in progress, complete)
  • When in a Learning Plan, show individual course due dates
L
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Userlevel 5
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I have tested the daylights out of the days of validity in their various forms and it’s still confusing. Sorry in advance for the long post.

In my testing I learned:

Course Validity Period, Course Days of Validity, Enrollment Validity, and Learning plan  Days of Validity, are all independent things, kinda.

Enrollment Start and End of validity are the things I think of as due dates. This is what you see on the enrollments tab in a course. This is what is used in MyTeam to show to the manager that the learner is overdue. Except maybe if there is a learning plan day of validity.

The learning plan day of validity creates a value in a field that I can see in the API, but no where else. This seems to be the value used if I want to use the notification “learning plan enrollment expiring”

Course Validity Period does not set an enrollment validity end date. So, if you set this date and enroll a user, nothing is populated in the enrollments tab when a learner is enrolled. Course validity period dates show to the learner on the course tile only when you are outside the date range.

Course Days of Validity does set an enrollment validity date if it is set before the learner is enrolled or you apply the change to currently enrolled users. It is definitely applied when the learner enrolls directly in the course. It is “maybe” applied when they are enrolled via a learning plan.

If your learning plan does not have any days of validity set and your course has Course days of validity set, when you enroll a user via the LP (which then enrolls them into the course) the Course days of validity are used in the enrollment start and end of validity. See eye chart below…..

At one point in my testing the LP days of validity over wrote the course days of validity, but I can’t recreate it now to save my life. I think there must be some other variables at play here.

Here are some scenarios and what I saw in testing.

 

Now, to add to the fun. Things might be changing soon. Those of you with a sandbox, please chime in on the new enrollments deadline when enrolling users into a learning plan feature that I have heard about.

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