A Course Catalog, or the list of courses to which users have access, is made available at the Business Unit level of the LMS organizational structure. Assigning courses to one or more Business Units is the fundamental way in which Portal Administrators scope course accessibility and create unique course catalogs to meet the specific training requirements of each organization.
While the Business Unit offers a high-level filter for course visibility and access rights, many other settings determine an individual user’s ability to find, view, and enroll in a course within his or her Course Catalog. Additional methods of restricting course visibility and enrollments include:
Course Settings that Control User Visibility and Access Rights
Portal Administrators encounter several course configuration options during the setup process that control course visibility and user enrollment.
Firstly, they can end date courses to permanently remove them from all other user views. Only users assigned the Portal Administrator role can search for, view, or edit inactive courses. To find inactive courses, use the Search Courses feature and remember to select Inactive or Both for the Status criterion.
Otherwise, it may be necessary to keep a course active and visible, but limit the open enrollment period. Or perhaps you want to temporarily hide a course while important updates are made, and later reopen the course for enrollment.
Course setup fields that help control visibility and access are described below. You can find them by expanding the “Additional Information” section of the General Information tab.
- Organizations: Assign the course to all Business Units that require it as part of their training programs. Users at non-associated Business Units cannot see the course.
- Course Display Date: Enter the date on which the course is made visible in the catalog. Administrators can set a date in the future to allow themselves time to set up the course and perform testing.
- Enrollment Open Date: For all self-paced course types (e.g. eLearning, Assessment, Self-Study), this is the date on which students will be allowed to start enrolling in the course. For Classroom course types, this date is the earliest day on which an Offering can be scheduled.
- Enrollment Close Date: For all self-paced course types, this is the date after which students will not be allowed to enroll in the course. Enrolled students may still launch or attend the course after this date, but no new enrollments are accepted. For Classroom course types, this date is the latest day on which an Offering can be scheduled.
- Course Hide Date: The date on which the course will be hidden in the catalog, and therefore inaccessible to students. On this date, self-paced courses will be removed from a user’s homepage, regardless of enrollment status. Note: Administrators can use this field to hide the course for business reasons or to eliminate access during content revisions. Tip: This is an important setting to consider when revising eLearning content in particular. If a student launches an eLearning course, but exits it prior to completion, uploading a revised version of the SCORM package could cause the student to experience launch issues on their attempt to resume the course where they left off. Hiding the course at the appropriate time can help reduce these issues.
- Days for Student to Complete (Due Date): The number of days a student is allowed to complete the course after first enrolled. Note: This field is not available for the "Classroom" or "Virtual Classroom" delivery methods.
- Days Before Due Date to Remind Student: Set the number of days before the due date that the system will send an email reminder to enrolled students. If multiple reminders are desired, enter them separated by commas. For example, entering “20,10,5” would result in a reminder being sent 20 days, 10 days and 5 days before the due date. Note: This field is not available for the “Classroom” or “Virtual Classroom” delivery methods. Reminders for Classroom courses are set at the Offering level.
Restrict Visibility and Enrollment for Class Offerings
While Classroom courses contain most of the same visibility parameters found for other course types, classroom course Offerings provide another enrollment restriction option: Distribution Groups. By default, when you create an offering for a classroom course, it is available to all users within the Business Units that house the course in their catalogs. However, you can restrict the availability of an offering to a specific subset of users by assigning them to distribution groups. For detailed information about setting up Distribution lists, see Create Distribution Lists for Classroom Course Enrollment.
You can set up and apply enrollment distribution lists at any time during the offering creation or editing process. The “Distribution” section of of the Add Offering page is shown below. For established Offerings, the fields shown below become available for editing on the Distribution tab.
- Start Date: Indicate the first day you want the offering to be visible to anyone in the distribution list. This setting allows you to delay offering visibility in order to fill earlier offerings.
- End Date: Indicate the day on which the offering will no longer be visible to users on the distribution list. They will not be able to enroll in the offering after this date.
Just as administrators can set course due date reminders at the course level, they can also set up automated Reminder Messages to alert enrolled students of their upcoming classroom offerings. On the Offering Details page, select the Messages tab, and indicate how many days prior to the offering you would like to send a Reminder Message to students. The Additional Note section is optional, and will pull into the default email message. Ad hoc class Announcements can also be sent to enrolled students from this page.
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