Instructor Identification

Ah this is a fun one...this may depend on how you manage your instructors. If you do not use separate profiles for instructors and users, this may be difficult depending on how you provision new users. If you do this manually, you can add a symbol, letter(s) or something else in their name to identify them. We do this and use “ (IN) “ in the Last Name field. 

We opted to create separate user profiles for our instructors to see things clean and allow the same person to take courses (as a user) and facilitate (as an instructor under another profile). It’s a little more work to manage but helps with reporting and certainly when booking sessions. 

This is an area that needs to improved for sure...here’s an idea you can vote on:

Thanks for the reply!  We are using oAuth account integration and have outside presenters.  It seems like you should at least be able to see an email when you are assigning an instructor to a course for verfication.  I upvoted and will add a comment..or two. 

you CAN type the email in the instructor field to find the Instrcutor profile provided that the email address is unique.

If provisioning automatically, you can create MANUAL instructor profiles so they are always apart from your users. This usually works well + since instructors usually only login before a session, they would only need to use this manual profile to launch a virtual session or mark attendance, evaluate, etc.; whatever you allow them to do on your site

Thanks.  I didn’t realize you could use the email address so that is quite helpful. 

You can use the username too, once you do the same repeatedly for a while, you start learning which of the repeating names are the right ones (or at least that happened to me, and helped decide this was not the good way to keep doing this :) )

The problem I ran into with this was the Instructors got confused as to which profile they needed to use, or log into to get their access for different tasks.

@Bfarkas this is why we opted to use a username and email other than what they would have as a normal user….

Right, but that is my point, they all complained about two accounts and knowing which to use and when. The push back from instructors was strong enough it was considered not a solution and why we moved to other solves. That being said, a convo last week on here has me thinking of doing some fancy home page which lets the user basically select a button and logs them in as the opposite user and back, letting them keep track of it easily and only need to know their one set of credentials.

We would also struggle with the two accounts- instructors can earn CEUs for teaching and taking courses.  They would have to track CEUs through two accounts...not ideal and more management work.