Course vs Learning Plan

Hey compadre. This may sound geeky. But always fall back to analytics and container behaviors or containership in my mind and your group assesses needs for any given campaign. Bulleting in no great particular order…..

• What are you trying to track?
• What does the content look like in the current state?
  • If I am migrating content from somewheres else - I aim for “like containership”
  • “Learning paths” often equal learning plans
• What is the UX going to be like with the curriculum?
  • No widgets help with training materials, only courses and LPs
• Who is going to work with maintaining the content later?
  • This drives towards access to LPs, Courses, and the Central Repository
• Who is going to be the targeted audience to what you are tracking?
  • Is a course curator? Or someone who is only looking for the metric?
• What behaviors or key functions do you need for your deployment?
  • Do you need some key functions about gradual release of a curriculum?
  • Do you need some key functions about hot/swapping training material?
  • Do you need an object to have a flexible completion status?
  • Do you need to lock a curriculum at a key time (validity)?
  • Do you need to send out notifications based on a schedule (can be done with both - and we personally avoid LP expiring notifications now)?
  • Do you need to send out notifications about the things inside the container (you cant do that with Courses/Training Materials as in pointing out what training materials are not completed yet - I believe 😀).
• Do you need certificates?
  • At what level? For the curriculum or for the “pieces” the course? Both? Or just one?

We have had a lot of issues with Learning Plans.  They are great in theory, but they have caused us several problems.  Generally, we allow our users to unenroll themselves from courses (except for required courses)… we’ve had users try to unenroll from a course and not have the option to do so because they had enrolled in a learning plan that contained that course - they are unable to unenroll from a course if it’s in a learning plan AND they don’t have the option to unenroll themselves from a learning plan, so they have to contact an Admin to be unenrolled from the learning plan.

On the Admin side, when we go to clean up course enrollments we get errors trying to unenroll users if they are enrolled in a learning plan that contains the course.  We then have to go to the learning plan first and unenroll them from the learning plan (thankfully that does have an option to also unenroll them from the courses in the plan).

Learning Plans have finally been updated some on the Admin side, where now we can at least see completion status from the learning plan directly, but I feel like there are still some additional improvements/functionality needed before I am willing to fully adopt the use of Learning Plans.

Another issue with Learning Plans is that (now that we can set courses within a learning plan to be optional or mandatory) they require one course to be mandatory or else you cannot publish the learning plan. This is a big issue for LPs that are made up of only optional courses. In that case, we’ve had to opt for separate courses instead. I do not understand why this choice was made, and if anyone has more information, I’d love to learn more.