Your observations are unfortunately correct.

The only way I was able to find, which is letting users to enroll into ILTs without any sessions scheduled in the future and have them assigned to past sessions, is by setting the course’s “Enrollment Policy” to “Pending Admin Approval” (it’s in the Advanced Properties → Catalog Options).

It’s not perfect, as I have to manually assign each enrollment to one of the past sessions, but at least everyone can enroll into those courses, and once I assign them, they can access past sessions to watch recordings.

If you don’t need to tract course completions, you can also upload recordings into a channel, there everyone who can see the channel will be able to watch them.

Great idea. It isn’t a lot of people but enough that it would be a pain to make a whole new course just to hold the video in it. I’ll do this thanks.

Hi jckemv,

We also have the 2 scenarios you are describing.

With former “webinars”, it was also not possible for a learner to enrol in the course after the training session without ending up in a wait list, waiting for an admin to approve him or her. When Docebo announced ILT courses a year ago or so, I was told that a learner would be able to enrol without passing through the wait list. Nevertheless, it was only now that we migrated from webinars to ILT courses for some reasons. But I experienced the same issue as you did, so we are now using the workaround which alekwo describes in his reply to your post. This requires some additional work for instructors/superadmins, but OK. At least I was able to set up a notification to the instructor that someone was waiting to be enrolled into a session.

But now I have an additional problem to solve: In our case, learners can only complete a webinar when they submit an additional validation survey which is added to the training material and marked as an end object. Well, this is easy to do and works well. But for us, both the webinar itself and the recording are equivalent, i. e. a learner who watches the video and then submits the survey will complete the course as a webinar attendant would.

From your post I know that you add the recording to the training materials. This makes it easy to control whether a video has been watched by the learner or not, because otherwise, he can’t move on to the survey.

But Docebo provides a second method to upload a recording at a very prominent position. Here is the admin’s view (the learner’s view is identical, but does not show the green button):

This means that when you upload your video to the training material, the learner will still see the sentence “Your attendance has not been recorded. Recordings are not available yet.” which in this case wouldn’t be true.

So you might say: Well, then it would be easier to add the recording here instead of to the training material. But this, unfortunately, does not trace course completions.

I would be happy to read some comments from the community on this issue. I do not think that the above use case is so specific that nobody else has this issue. Your opinions and ideas are more than welcome.

By the way: I know that with ILT courses, the learner needs to be enrolled to a session to participate in whichever way. So wouldn’t it be good to give the learner an option to enrol to a past session which has a recording?

We just always do a second course that is just watching the video for anyone who did not show up to the live session and then set cross-credit. Helps with reporting requests for how many watched later vs. attended in person. I had been working on a nice API setup for basically select the original course and video url and it took care of the rest for me.

Thanks Barkas, that’s a very interesting approach! But it has some drawbacks for us:

• Without your API knowledge, it is quite cumbersome for our course creators to duplicate a course.
• Many of our learners who attended the live session want to watch the recording as well to consolidate their knowledge. This means that the course creator needs to upload the recording to the initial course and to the new course, or - in case you hide the initial course - he would have to enrol to the new course.
• The new course needs to be an e-learning course so that a user will be able to watch the recording without passing through the wait list. It’s not an ILT course (or webinar) anymore.

Totally get it. For the second and third bulllets, I have it auto enroll as options so this is taken care of for them. In my mind, if you’re not attending live to be able to actively participate, is it really an ILT anymore?

Hi @alekwo,

We have been using your workaround ever since I read your above post. I will receive a notification email and the learner will be displayed in the My Task list under “Course enrolment approval”. It’s some additional manual work, but that’s OK.

But now I came across another issue which is quite similar: I created a learning plan with 2 ILT courses which both will have recordings after the sessions. Now, when a learner enrols to the learning plan after the sessions are over, his status will not become “Pending Admin Approval” in the waiting list even though this is set in both courses.

Instead of being in the waiting list, his status is “enrolled, without sessions assigned”. So the instructor will not receive any notification about his status, nor will he see it in the “My Tasks” list. Such situations can only be found in the system by actively searching for them.

As a consequence, unfortunately, not even your above workaround will work when ILT courses are part of a learning plan! It is really annoying.

There are so many workflows not accounted for in the current setups unfortunately

This is true. And we spend so much time testing all relevant settings to achieve certain goals without confusing our learners too much. And this only because learners cannot enrol to sessions in the past. In our case, it makes no difference to attend a webinar or to watch its recording.

I’m running into this issue as well and filed an idea. It’s frustrating that there is no way to accommodate ILT learners who sign up AFTER a live event without basically doing 2x the work, either creating a new session, or a whole new course.

Check out this idea and upvote if it would be helpful to you:

I have been using this approach of creating a second course that has the recording for those who did not enroll for the VILT session and it has been working well. I want to look into how many learners who enrolled but did not attend are viewing that new recording course, versus learners who were not enrolled in the VILT to begin with and came across the recording later. 

I have the VILT Course set so it marks as complete by attending or viewing the rcording. Is there any reporting on the uploaded recording within the VILT? I’m looking for a way to distingush in the VILT completion if the learner attended live or watched the recording, and if any learners who attended are going back to watch the recording.