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Hello again from Latitude R&D. This is Tom Merritt with a monthly update on some of our activities regarding the LMS.
We ended last year with a lot of enhancements: person-to-person reporting, course group, unlimited user search and unlimited announcements to name a few. We are continuing our momentum into this new year with yet more enhancements and capabilities.
Recent Product Enhancement – Required Training Widget
Some of our clients have asked for a clearer representation of required training for students; that is, a more focused way of defining or highlighting the training so students know what they should especially focus on. As an answer to this we created a required training widget. The required training widget would display required training for the student on their home page. In this case, required training is considered any training set as a certification or a curriculum goal on the student’s Goals tab. If it is set as a goal, it is considered required training.
The portal administrator can choose to turn on the required training widget by going to the LMS Information page and selecting “’Show Required Training on Home Page?” This will activate the widget, which will appear at the top of the home page. Once activated, the required training widget will display any goals-based training for which the student currently qualifies.
To understand how this would work, consider the following example: a certification has three courses that are required in order to earn the certification. The certification appears as a goal on a student’s Goals page, so it is considered required training for that student. In this case, all three courses would appear in that student’s required training widget.
Now let’s modify the scenario a bit. Let’s say the first course in a certification is a prerequisite to the second course, which is in turn a prerequisite for the third course. Again, the certification appears as a goal on the student’s Goals tab. In this case, at first, only the first course would appear in the required training widget, because due to prerequisites the student is only eligible to work on the first course. Once he finishes that course, the second course would appear, because he has completed the prerequisite first course and is now eligible to take the second. Finally, after finishing the second course, the third course would appear.
Use the required training widget if you think that highlighting required training for your students may be helpful in executing your training program.
Upcoming Releases
- We are currently working on Unlimited Enroll Others, which as we’ve mentioned before will allow administrators to enroll an unlimited number of users in a course, eliminating the current limitation of 100 users.
- Along with Unlimited Enroll Others, we’re working on Enhancing Distributions with the ability to define a dynamic set of users so that administrators can create a much more exacting definition of a population. We're renaming the Distributions capability to "Audience" for more general use, which will include the ability to enroll a particular set of people in a course, perform user searches, and send announcements to specific groups of people.
- Revisions to the Employees page will offer a graphical representation of the goals which have been set for employees as well as the progress they have made.
- Course Goals will allow managers to set goals for courses and track student progress.
Proposed Enhancements
We have posted a new blog for enhancements and suggestions. We are open to your comments on all of them. Please review them here. A sample of some of these:
- Course Taxonomy – displaying a navigable taxonomy for courses, providing another means of navigating the catalog of courses
- Course Evaluations – we’re looking at a new way of doing course evaluations as a required step for completing a course or certification path
What's Coming for 2017
As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, we’re focusing on developing a new reporting engine for users to create and save their own reports. We’re also looking to enhance the user interface with responsive design and be more intuitive and functional for students and managers. You’ll see information about these in the coming months as we make progress defining and building these enhancements.
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