The only thing I can think of is adding all the learning plans on the same topic in the same Course Catalog. Perhaps by using Custom Pages with HTML and CSS, you could create a page with nice, fancy buttons that link to specific catalogs? I believe our old CSM once showed us an example of it from another client’s domain.
 

Alternatively, you could create an Automatic Group based that automatically adds users to it based on their completion of other courses (from other learning plans). Afterwards, you would have to use Enrollment Rules to link this group to another learning plan… That way, once your users complete one learning plan, they would automatically be enrolled to the next one.

@abartunek the last example is what a few clients that I work with are also doing, so that makes a lot of sense :)

Hi @xmasrock, happy first post!

This is a great one. I can’t tell you how many times since I started using Docebo I’ve thought “wow I wish I could create a Learning Plan inside a Learning Plan. Much like @abartunek’s suggestion, I’d first advise using catalogs to organize multiple learning plans. You can set the catalog sort order to be based on course code, then set the Learning Plan codes to be sequential like 005-, 010-, 015-, etc. so that they show up in the order you’d like.

Then, you could set visibility for certain groups to one or multiple catalogs that contain one or multiple learning plans. Then the completion of those learning plans could lead to users being added to additional groups, which could lead to having visibility to additional catalogs, and thus additional learning plans. You could set all of these catalogs to display in one or multiple catalog widgets on a page, and only the catalogs that the user has visibility to would show on the page. That’s one way that you could sort of “automate” which catalogs and learning plans the user would see at any given time.

It’s important to note for others who might discover this thread that the hierarchy of formal course content in Docebo is as follows:

• Catalog
  • Learning plan
    • Course
      • Learning Object (Training Materials)

Catalogs can contain multiple Learning Plans, Learning Plans can contain multiple Courses, Courses can contain multiple Learning Objects, but none of these can include the same content type within themselves (i.e. LP in LP or Course in Course). With that said, you might consider breaking down your content into smaller pieces so that the smallest “building block” is a Learning Object. This might give you more room to adjust the hierarchy. In any case, you can use the same Learning Objects and Courses across multiple Courses/Learning Plans so that you track progress consistently throughout the platform.

Thanks @abartunek & @Adam Ballhaussen for your very useful responses :)

My objective is to propose a learning journey by profiles (which should translate to a catalog then if I understand). Thus, I want to make sure that all steps toward the objectives are seen and understood for people going this path and also I want to make sure they can follow where they are what’s remaining (in term of content but also on time investment). To complement that, I want to provide visibility for team managers to see how their team(s) are doing.

Today, we are using Learning Plans and follow the progression (exporting the data to PowerBI,  maybe another topic here). Seems to me that it could be more difficult at a catalog level.

@xmasrock that’s a really cool concept. I think this tracking could still be accomplished if you used a combination of groups controlled by learning plan completion, catalogs, and learning plans. Without specific information about your exact use case, consider the following setup:

1. Group 1 corresponds to Profile 1 has visibility to Catalog 1 that includes Learning Plans 1, 2, and 3.
2. Report on Learning Plans 1, 2, and 3 for all learners who are in Group 1.
3. Group 2 corresponds to Profile 2. This group consists of everyone who completed all 3 learning plans from Group 1 and this Group 2 has visibility to Catalog 2 that includes Learning Plans 4, 5, and 6.
4. Report on Learning Plans 4, 5, and 6 for all learners who are in Group 2.

You could essentially repeat this process for as many profiles/catalogs/learning plans you have and use any combination of learning plans among the various catalogs.

To generate these reports in Docebo, you would want to create a Users - Learning Plans report for each group that is filtered by Group and that includes only the Learning Plans that are associated to that group. You could also, as you mentioned, use a 3rd party BI tool like Power BI to consolidate these reports in a similar way and add filters/segmentation for Groups, Learning Plans, etc.

Do you think this solution could meet your use case?

hi @Adam Ballhaussen @xmasrock , I have a similar use case but I might not be able to create groups of users as the info from our CRM into Docebo might not contain this segmentation information. My use case is the following

• I have 2 learning plans: LP1 and LP2
• LP1 contains Course C1, C2 and LP2 contains LP1 + C3, C4

I’d like to reduce the maintenance cost of LP2: I don’t want to re-create it from scratch andinclude C1, C2 C3 and C4, I would like to be able to say : it’s LP1 and C3, C4. IF LP1 evolves, great, LP2 will follow.

now, on the reporting side, I’d like to be able to extract data and learn: what is the completion rate of LP1 and LP2. by completion rate, I mean: how many people have completed <10%, 10-20%, 20-40%…. 80-100%. not just a binary answer completed yes/no, but a %age of completion, and be able to sort by range.

@Adam Ballhaussen would your solution apply to my use case?

@xmasrock how similar is your use case to mine?

You are referring to “nested” learning plans, which is something I have experienced before. Please vote for the idea I submitted: 

• LMS-I-3655 

@MarcLalo I believe my solution would apply to your use case well. As @LMSica mentioned, the most straightforward solution could be some form of a “nested” learning plan, but Docebo doesn’t currently support that.

Regardless, you can create two LPs as you mentioned without adding any maintenance overhead. If you use the Central Repository to house all of the learning objects for your courses, then you will only ever need to make updates to the learning objects in one place. If LP2 contains C1, C2, C3, and C4, then when you update C1 or C2, it will update in both LP1 and LP2. You can report on Learning Plan completion percentage by building a Users - Learning Plan report. This knowledge article on building new custom reports should help you there!

You can filter for LP1 and LP2 and select to display Completion Percentage in the Learning Plan Enrollment Fields in View Options.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

A couple of things to consider when creating complex course structures in this and any LMS - I have learnt the hard way:

• is it possible to create a plan that allows learners to know and feel like they have completed it? i.e. is it too complex that the overall picture is too complex to visualise or work out
• will the way you configure your system allow you to easily report on the progress of the learner, or the overall progress of all the learners? I’ve found it very hard to find answers to this problem with a lot of manual work, even with the sophisticated reports in Docebo Learn.
• will the “100% completion” type learners be able to see they have done everything, or is it impossible to make that clear, or to support optional paths in the design it will never be possible. They are just noisy crickets otherwise even if it isn’t important in the overall learning space.
• can you add or adjust the course/LP configuration without breaking some of the LMS system features that do not work retrospectively like notifications, and some pre-requisite setups etc.. which has caught me a few times. 

Food for thought as the more complex and more cleverly you configure everything, more more you will need to test and think through the management of that program of work looking at it from different views - instructor, sysadmin, report analysis, learner, progress tracking etc...

@LMSica I can’t access the voting part of that feature. can you copy/paste (I tried to click the partial URL which is now gone last week w/o success) in your response to that thread?

@Adam Ballhaussen , the central repository contains Training Materials, and sure, you can create 2 courses pointing to content hosted there. we use versioning as well, so that’s a cool feature: for instance, we have course for our company which uses 8 TM, and the same course for partner uses 7 of these TM. it’s indeed very easy to use/maintain/report. The LP thing is probably a nested level above that. 

I’ll try to use your “Users - Learning Plan report” ! thanks for the tip! thanks for your help! 

adding my two cents...I think it’s safe to say that the Learning Plan app needs work. Right now it’s very basic and only allows you to select whether the user needs to complete all courses or only a number specified by the admin and force the order of completion of courses by way of prerequisites...I call this a good start but we certainly need more options. I believe there are many ideas already posted. That said, some of the options I would like to see are:

• allow admin to select a specific course to indicate completion of the leaning plan
• allow admin to manually select which of the courses are mandatory to complete the LP
• allow admin to identify optional/mandatory courses
• a single notification for the entire learning plan enrollment
• refresh of the LP admin page to allow search, more columns, etc.
• nested plans
• re: nested plans, allow and either/or path within the LP (for example: a user could be required to complete a certain number of courses but also be allowed to choose from a list of optional courses that count towards the completion of the LP...this is is trick one but soooo helpful (i used this on other LMSs)

If you go to the Ideas Portal and enter “LMS-I-3655” into the search bar, you should be able to find the idea. I can’t provide you with a link because it would take you to our Docebo URL. Hope this helps!

We use badges to simulate this. You can create a custom badge and select that all of the small learning plans listed must be completed to receive the badge. Then you can run a report on who has received the badge to see who has completed the “full learning plan.” It’s definitely not ideal, but it is the best we have until they (hopefully) fix the learning plan functionality. 

@LMSica   I can no longer find your idea LMS-I-3655 in the Ideas Portal.  I know it was there because I voted for it and am tracking it in our ideas progress spreadsheet with an origination date of February 1, 2021.  It’s gone now.  Not sure why and no ideas with “nested learning plan” come up in a search.

Hi @jmkachidurian, thanks for pointing this out! Jessica’s idea was merged into idea DL-I-1254, Learning Plans that contain other Learning Plans, which currently has 75 votes. All votes/comments were transferred as a part of this merge. I still really like this idea and understand there are a number of use cases for which it might be relevant.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

@Adam Ballhaussen If I could pick 1 feature to add to docebo in 2021, this would be it. It’s something we have to work around daily. It would be an absolute game changer for our organization.

Hey all and thanks for all the discussion around Learning Plans! 

As you may know, Learning Plan Management is still one of the “older” areas of the platform, as in, it has not yet been brought over to our newer interface/styling. One of our upcoming projects is the “porting” of learning plans management to that new framework, and at that time we would like to add some improvements to the feature. This is what we are thinking (though keep in mind each item needs to be checked for feasibility and effort). 

• Improved Search/Sorting/Column Preview (in general it should be consistent with areas like course management and channel management)
• Enrollments Management Improvements-  Better enrollments management and workflows and hopefully, the ability to enroll users to learning plan via CSV
• Optional Courses within a LP. We see this request a lot and if it’s feasible, we’d love to do it. 
• Ability to Copy an LP

As for the topic of this thread, “nested learning plans”, I must admit that it is unlikely we will build it, at least with the initial porting of learning plans. 

• From a UI standpoint, visualizing nested Learning Plans to the user would be a challenge. In theory if a LP can contain another LP, what is stopping that second LP from containing another LP, and so on. This would be a hard concept to visualize to a learner, particularly within the current design. We could take the approach of limiting it to one level, but we don’t think that would solve all cases and would reduce the overall benefit of the feature. 
• We believe that there could be a lot of unintended consequences of this feature. The main one is that if a course is added to a LP, the admin must understand and know every LP that LP exists in else they run the risk of reverting the progress of users in all those other LPs. Interestingly enough, this would be the biggest benefit of the feature but also the biggest risk. 
• From a code perspective, determining completion of the “master” LP would be a large effort if we introduce another level of nesting. This means that our “Core Teams” (our teams which work on the more generic or core LMS features), could be tied up for quite some time trying to deliver this. 

That said, we think there are some other features we can add to consideration for the learning plan management porting. While they are not “nested learning plans”, they may address some of the paint points noted here in this thread and also in this idea. 

• Allow “sectioning” within a learning plan (basically, allowing you to insert HTML sections within the learner view of a learning plan, allowing better visual segmentation/explanation to the user.) In this way, to the learner, it can seem like different learning plans in one. 
• Allow admins to select a learning plan when adding courses to a learning plan. So instead of manually adding however many courses that compose that other LP, allowing you to reference another learning plan, which would then add those same courses to the current LP. This would address the effort to create “branched/ role customized” learning plans from scratch, but the “connection” to that learning plan after the courses are added would not be maintained. 

I hope that wasn’t too much of a let down for you folks and that you can understand our side of it a little better. Thank you all so much for your participation and feedback here and thanks @Adam Ballhaussen for letting me know about the discussion! I’m tagging also here @riccardogalimberti who leads up our Core Teams which will work on Learning Plans (Hi Riccardo!)

Nate

Thanks for all of this info @natemadel! I’m sure many of the members in this thread will be happy to see some of the planned improvements in store for learning plans. You mentioned some valid technical concerns/considerations that might result from building learning plans within other learning plans, and @jckemv shared some really great advice earlier in this thread related to “keeping things simple” when it comes to building your curriculum.

The DU team is currently considering how we can better break down the courses that comprise the Getting Started with Docebo learning plan into more “component parts”. Nested learning plans could’ve been one way to solve for this, but we’re certain we can do it through a combination of individual courses, catalogs, and LPs.

@angel.maenza @xmasrock @LMSica @lrnlab @jmkachidurian I’m curious to hear your thoughts on these updates. Could any of the other ideas and solutions presented earlier in this thread help you with your use cases that led to the idea for nested learning plans? And could any of the other planned updates that Nate shared help with your use case? Thank you all for the continued feedback and collaboration.

@Adam Ballhaussen @natemadel 

With nested learning plans out, some sort of “folder” organization - similar to what you see in the training material section would be extremely helpful. If we could select other learning plans when adding content, then put them in a folder and order them in a way that was logical to our users, that would get us half way there. 

The only problem remaining is that admins would have to know when content was added to a learning plan to then go back and add it into the folder associated with that content. With so many users creating content and learning plans, I can see this quickly becoming an issue, so maybe if a notification could be created for specific learning plans when content was added/deleted - that would be awesome to fill the gap. 

Thank you both for hearing us out on this topic and trying to find ways to help us manage complex learning structures. While I love the idea of keeping it simple, when you have 3 different user groups all taking advantage of the same materials, it gets complicated quickly. 

@Adam Ballhaussen @natemadel 

I understand the impact implied by “nested LPs” and I recognize that it could have unexpected side effects. 

Then, I can think of a new “LP Bundle” concept which could limit those side effects and bring the capability we are looking for.

Meaning: I not giving up, it is a really needed capability

WYT?

@xmasrock I appreciate the persistence ;)

I think that approach would probably be the prefered one, i.e. - creating a new concept apart from a learning plan, capable of housing learning plans. Something like a “curriculum” (though Learning Plans are sometimes referred to as that). We will keep in on our radar for after we port Learning Plans. The thing we always need to weigh against is simplicity, since we would then have Learning Objects > LO folders > Courses > Learning Plans > Curriculum, the latter half of which could be placed in channels or catalogs, and frankly that’s treading on a slightly “daunting” level of hierarchy for a new admin to understand, which we try to be cognisant of. 

Nate

Agree, LP & Curriculum  are not obvious to understand. However, LP and LP Bundles are pretty easy to get 

@natemadel even being able to re-order/set the order of learning plans within channels might be sufficient for @xmasrock ‘s idea of “bundling” learning plans. We currently do not use channels at all in our organization - we found them to be less useful without Discover Coach and Share - but this is one way we could actually make use of them.

The caveat to that is that we would need to be able to report out on channel completion :) 

Just an idea!! 

@natemadel @Adam Ballhaussen I saw this change to unlikely to implement today in the suggestion area. I would request that Docebo give this one more view before coming to a decision on it - or delaying it any further. As I stated previously, this is the biggest issue we face with assigning training, especially for large or complex topics (20+ courses). I polled some of my coworkers today out of curiosity and can verify that SuccessFactors LMS as well as Cornerstone LMS and Litmos, which individuals in our training/enablement program have used previously, have ALL included this feature. 

As well as needing optional modules in a learning plan, having the ability to have nested learning plans would be so valuable.

I know we keep asking, and with very little reply, but I'll give it another go. 

Does anyone know when learning plans are going to be revamped?