LatitudeLearning® is excited to announce several coming enhancements to the LMS. These updates are now live in the LMS - here's what to look for:
Course Attributes Entity for the Report Writer
We've added a new Course Attributes reporting entity to the Report Writer, which allows you to build reports about your course catalog. It includes filters and columns for common course settings, prerequisites, equivalencies, and offering-related settings. Unlike the existing Course entity which focuses on user transcripts, this new entity reports on Course- and Offering-related master data and configuration information.
Restrict Course Enrollment by Audience
For those of you who use or are considering the use of Audiences, we added a new course attribute which will let you associate an Audience with a Course or Course Offering to restrict enrollment to just those Audience members at the time.
On a course, the new Enrollment Restricted by Audience field is available on Add Course and on Edit Course under the General tab's Additional Information Section. The drop-down options default to No Restriction, but will list all active Audiences in your portal as available for selection. The field is required and only allows one Audience association per course.
On an Offering, the new Enrollment Restricted by Audience field is available on Add Offering and on Edit Offering under the General Tab. It will default to the setting shown on the parent course, but you can alter it per offering to a different audience or none at all.
Processes and pages that come into play during self-enrollment or enroll others are updated to reflect the new enrollment restriction. If you use this option, you may see new enrollment conflicts or warnings display when users do not belong to the specified audience. If a user loses Audience membership after enrollment, the enrollment is unchanged and will not be automatically cancelled.
New Offering Enrollment and Waitlist Deadlines
Changes to Course Offering configuration will help administrators and instructors get a tighter control over when users can enroll in an offering and when waitlisted users are cleared from the waitlist before or after the offering start date. One of the great benefits of this update is that it creates an enrollment window that eliminates surprise, last-minute participants in offerings for which detailed planning and preparation have already been finalized.
Prior to the enhancement, enrollment restrictions by date on offerings were a function of the Distribution functionality. For this enhancement, we moved the distribution dates up to the General section and renamed them Offering Enrollment Start Date and Offering Enrollment End Date. You can now use them with or without a Distribution. Enrollment outside of the dates creates a conflict. Automated processes for enrollment are not be allowed outside the enrollment window and the offering will not display to Students, Location Managers, or Location Admins. If no enrollment dates are entered, the process works in the current manner. Distribution functionality is also unchanged with the exception of the date fields' relocation.
This enhancement also renamed the field Waitlist Days to Waitlist Close Days and added a corresponding Waitlist Expires Days field. The latter setting lets you configure when to clear waitlisted students a specified number of days before or after the first meeting time.
Both the Audience and Offering Enrollment restrictions are a hard conflicts for Students, Location Managers, and Location Administrators. A Portal Administrator, Administrator, or Instructor will be able to override these conflicts at any time.
We’re pleased to continue adding new capabilities to the LMS and hope that they help make managing your training programs even easier! Follow our Release Notes to keep track of enhancements and software assurance updates as they're released!
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