Restricting audience for an ILT/ViLT session

There are some options found under advaced settings: 

You han also switch of the ability to self enrol bye enrollemt link: 
 

You could change the course enrolment policy settings in the course under “Catalogue Options”, so that only Admins can enrol learners or make enrolments pending admin approval. But in that case you’d have potentially quite some manual work to do.

Sharing a self-enrolment link is tricky to restrict in itself since it’s purpose is to actually enrol people directly. Why not just sharing the link to the course itself without direct enrolment? 

I think that using the catalogue might be the best approach here, without knowing additional details. Keeping an eye on this though to see other ideas. 

Thanks @vegard.ofstaas  & @StefanW - Yes, Admin approval requires a lot of manual work as we might have quite a lot of sessions planned for the year. So I would prefer self-enrollment, yet restrict from the other set of audience.

Fingers crossed to see if we get any different ideas here.

@anikhat The way I have worked around this exact use case is to turn off self enrollments and only allow course visibility if enrolled, and then enroll the appropriate audience to the course so that they can access it.  Not ideal as it inflates enrollment counts, but it does restrict the course to a specific audience.

What if you do like this?
 

In my experience the settings shown below (Advanced Settings → Catalog Options) was the best way for us to publish a course, allow self-enrollment, yet limit the audience to the exact users we want enrolled in the course through the use of “Pending Admin Approval”:

It is not the most ideal option, as you would still need to manually manage the enrollment waitlist yourself, or via a Power User as we did, and approve / deny the specific users into the ILT / VILT. Again, still some manual steps but this seemed to be the best option for restricting enrollment for certain courses.

Hope this helps!

Are you using Learning Plans that have the ILT in it?

We direct almost all of our training through Learning Plans with a mix of e-learning and ILT/vILTs. Once a student is enrolled in the “course” as a result of being enrolled in the Learning Plan then they can enroll in any session.

The only way we found to prevent self-enrollment is through the use of the Self Enrollment Deadline (in the Session properties) prior to the start of the creation of the session. We typically set the date to before the session was created.

Thanks everyone. Well no we do not use Learning Plans and our entire audience is Internal only. We manage the e-learning courses in 2 different ways:

1. Mandatory courses will be assigned - meaning we enroll the required audience(groups) via the Enrollment rules. This way the audience is easily restricted.
2. Optional courses - placed in Catalogs. Audience is easily restricted here as well, as the Catalog visibility is again directed by Groups.

However when it comes to ILT/ViLT, these would be optional courses but need to be restricted to employees only and not the Contract workers. These would be more of Soft-skill / Leadership trainings, which is why we would not want these to be tagged to any other courses/learning plans.

----- I think the only option is to either use Catalogs & self-enrollment (if no manual work) and go for pending admin admin approval as an additional step to self-enrollment (if ok to go for manual steps).

Well thanks again to all of your inputs and ideas, appreciate it :)


 

One of the nice things about the “Pending Admin Approval” is that you can assign this job / function to a specific Power User. This could be the instructor or anyone else who has the knowledge to know / approve who the audience should be.

There also might be a way you can create a group of users, either through a course completion status or some other criteria like email or Company, that can then have immediate access to the optional courses. This can be accomplished with an auto group creation, creation of a catalog, and then linking the new group to the “Optional Courses” via the catalog.

This took me several attempts / waitlist courses before I was able to nail down the process that I felt worked best for our instance. Best of luck 👍

Thanks @dmarsh 

Happy to help @anikhat! I recall spending at least a week fine tuning this process to work for our particular needs, so I’m glad I can pass that knowledge along. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions when you go to set this up. One final note...notifications, to both users and instructors, are extremely important for making this entire process work smoothly!

Sure :). Agreed on the notifications piece, will surely reach out if I need any help regarding this, as I have just started setting up and tetsing the available features for ILT/ViLT section.

We have had success restricting by turning OFF the Global Search so that the only way learners can “see” that course as an option is through their specific catalogs.  We also don’t allow the enrollment link “sharing” or any other kind of social “sharing” of courses or assets in the platform.  Our user experience is very specific to the role/function/certification of the user, so we prescribe their pages/menus/catalogs, etc.  

@hwolfehall How do you stop the “sharing” of the enrollment link? Do you just discourage the practice, or is there an option within Docebo that allows you to do that???

As seen in some of the screenshots from others, you can disable the Enrollment Link completely.  It is an optional feature.  I would only enable it on things that you DO want your users to share indiscriminately and informally to each other.  Anything that should be prescribed/restricted visibility should be accessible only through specific catalog(s) with visibility based off group conditions.  

Thanks @hwolfehall  - This is exactly what I follow as well in our Org. 
Global search is turned off, required courses to required folks using groups and Enrollment rules - so they get auto-enrolled, while ensuring the sharing of enrollment link option is disabled.
Where as the optional courses are placed in Catalogs, which again is driven by the groups to ensure a Catalog is accessed only by the required group of folks.
 

Looks like our design plan matches wrt groups, pages, menus, catalogs etc :).

@elainethetrainer - Thank you. Yes I thought the same that Catalog could be the only way out.

“even if a user has the enrollment link, they still cannot access the course.” - I learnt something new here, will definitely test this out. Thanks :)

Yes @dmarsh - here is the option for it.
 

We ended up building out an entire external process embedded into some custom pages to be able to control specific sessions for certain branches but still allow self-enrollment choices, definitely an area that could use an idea or two well thought out and upvoted.