Updated User Interface for Creating Custom Programs

Custom programs are a popular method for firms to group together similar courses and assign collections of learning in one go. Whether grouped by subject or experience level, many of our firms and their users, make effective use of custom programs daily.

If you create programs regularly, you may have noticed some small changes in the way creating a program looks. However, don’t worry, the process is essentially the same.

To start, you’ll need to select the cog in the top right of the navigation bar and click on ‘Programs’.

This will take you through to your firm’s catalogue of custom programs. To create a new program, scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘Add a new program’.

Here, you will need to enter a ‘Full name’ and ‘Short name’ for your course. These can be the same but try to include your firm name or something that would help to differentiate it from any of our core catalogue programs.

You can leave the other fields empty and scroll down to ‘Settings’. Here, you will see ‘Allow extension requests. If you’re happy for users to be able to request an extension on any assigned due date, you can leave this as it is. However, if you would prefer them to not have this option, you will need to untick the box.

You can then click ‘Save changes’.

If you have previously created programs, here’s where things might look a little different.

Upon saving your program settings, you will be taken through to the ‘Details’ tab which is a summary of the settings that you’ve just confirmed. You will need to click on the ‘Content’ tab to start adding your courses.

On the content tab, you will see the button ‘Add course set’.

Courses are added to programs in ‘sets’. These can be useful if you wish to break up your program into different subject areas. You can also set certain criteria which will force users to complete sets in a specific order.

For example, if you are creating an induction program for someone new to the industry, you may wish to have separate sets for company policies, health and safety, introduction to insurance etc. You can then order these how you would prefer them to be completed and stipulate that the previous set be finished before they can proceed to the next.

To start adding courses, click ‘Add course set’ and the settings box for your course set will appear.

Give your set a name. If you only require one set, this could just be the same as the program. You can also stipulate whether all or some of the courses in this set are compulsory and if only some, how many. You can leave the other fields blank.

To select your courses, click the blue plus button in the centre of the dotted yellow box.

In the pop-up window, you can select your courses. You can scroll through a full list of courses on the system, use the search bar to search for specific courses, or look for different course subjects by clicking the dropdown arrow next to ‘All’ in the top left and filtering by category.

Once you’re happy with your selection, click ‘Add’. You will see the tiles for each of your selected courses appear. To re-order the courses, you can simply drag and drop the tiles, or to remove any click the red X underneath the bottom right of the tile.

Then, click ‘Save’ in the bottom right of the Set box.

If you are only creating a single set within your program, this is now complete. You can proceed to assigning the program through the ‘Allocate Learning’ tool, under the ‘Manage Learning’ tab. You will find your new program in the catalogue named after your firm (usually, located directly underneath the Core Catalogue). In this example, we are using the ‘Demo Group’ firm.

If you would like to set up a second set of courses, you can repeat the process.

When you have your second set of courses you can then set the progression rule. This will default to ‘then’, meaning your learners will have to complete the first set before being able to proceed to the second. If you would like to provide the option for them to complete one OR the other set, you can change this to ‘or’. Alternatively, if you require them to complete all sets but are happy for them to complete the sets in any order, you can change this to ‘and’.

Once you have confirmed the progression rule, your program is ready to be assigned as outlined above.