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Workarounds for the lack of due dates in ILT courses?

  • 24 April 2024
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Hi folks,

We’ve discovered a little later than we’d have liked that ILT courses don’t really support due dates. Rather, the Days of Validity field on an ILT course affects how long the learner can access the course after their last session ends.

First, a bit of context. We have more than 10,000 employees worldwide, and we have a number of compliance trainings that everyone needs to complete. Previously, we were monitoring due dates in PowerBI, but in order to grant line managers visibility over their direct reports’ compliance, we want to get these due dates into Docebo.

To complicate matters, some employees are expected to take the e-learning while others are expected to get their training via ILT. For a couple of reasons, these two groups have different deadlines: 40 days for e-learning and 90 days for ILT.

We’ve sadly only just realized that “Days of Validity” on ILT courses has nothing to do with “due dates”, and as such will not work as intended with the “My Team” page. So I came here to see if anyone has any experience with a similar issue and/or advice on how to work around this. I’ll share the best idea I’ve had so far, but hoping that someone else can do better:

Ian’s ugly proposed hack:

Instead of two courses (e-learning + ILT), create three courses:

  1. E-Learning by name, E-Learning by type
    We would have this course in any event. It’s for the e-learners, and the Days of Validity would be set to 40 post-enrollment. There is no self-enrollment for these as we manage enrollment centrally.
     
  2. ILT by name, E-Learning by type (a.k.a. “thanks, i hate it”)
    This cursed entity would have Days of Validity set to 90 post-enrollment. No self-enrollment here, either. There would also be an equivalence set up with the next course:
     
  3. ILT by name, ILT by type
    The point of this course would be for us to still be able to record relevant session data in Docebo, rather than simply marking someone as “complete”. We would not set Days of Validity as it would serve no purpose. I doubt we would open self-enrollment here.

We’d want to be careful with respect to catalog assignments and publishing states and visibility for the last two courses. Wherever possible, it would be ideal to hide one of them from the stakeholder who did not need to see it, e.g. ideally course #3 would not be visible in My Team (at least prior to completion), whereas ideally course #2 would not be visible to the Power Users who can manually record ILT completions.

Also, It remains to be seen whether we’d be better off exporting the reports for course #2 or course #3 to PowerBI… Course #2 would be more consistent in terms of data structure with Course #1, but if I tested this correctly, I think the completion dates would be wrong (i.e. the date the completion was recorded, not the date of the session). I suppose maybe we could export both and then use some PowerBI logic to overwrite the Course #2 completion date if there’s an earlier one for Course #3, but wow this is getting messy…

Anyhow, I welcome your thoughts! Can you think of a better way to manage this?

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Best answer by lrnlab 24 April 2024, 16:32

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Hello @Ian - you have a lot going on here. As soon as you say due dates I start thinking Certifications. Have you considered Certifications and possibly Learning Plans?

Userlevel 7
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Just tried to add a due date (expiry date) and it is working for ILT courses...you need to add it via the Enrolment. Only real issue is when the due date passes, the course is locked. There is no “soft deadline” option on ILT courses. 

The below was not set-up using the “days of validity” on the properties tab; set on the user enrolment 

Is that what you’re looking for?

Userlevel 7
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found this you can vote up if you like

 

Userlevel 4
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Thank you, @lrnlab! I was indeed missing that it’s still possible to set the expiry date on the enrollment level. It’s not ideal for us, because we use enrollment rules and I’ve not been able to find a way to make this part of the enrollment rule configuration itself (and with e-learning, the Days of Validity option works so that we don’t need to).

That said, I think I should be able to use Docebo Connect to update the enrollments -- maybe daily is enough -- with an expiration date that’s 90 days from the enrollment date. Which is probably preferable to my ugly hack described above.

The interesting thing is that most of our ILT learners will probably never log into Docebo as end users -- if they could, we’d target them with e-learning instead (at least for these compliance trainings). So a soft deadline for ILT (while definitely a good idea) probably wouldn’t change anything for us. The thing I’d prefer to see is the Days of Validity for ILT working to add that expiration date at the time of enrollment.

Thank you as well, @dwilburn. I’d not really considered bringing in yet another entity (such as certifications or learning plans) because whatever functionality they would offer around due dates would also come with a lot of cruft and confusion. But I definitely appreciate the suggestion!

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