Academy and mandatory courses

Purpose

The Academy offers courses of the sense.AI.tion Academy as video or SCORM courses. As an administrator, you decide which of these courses are mandatory courses for your company. The Controlboard then shows for each user how many mandatory courses are completed and reminds users of open courses by email.

Who can see this?

• Academy card on the Applications page: all signed-in users. It opens the Academy, see Applications.
• Settings › Academy: administrators only. If the system denies access, the message “This area is only available for administrators.” appears instead of the list.
• Mandatory courses column and reminder in the user list Company › User: administrators.
• Academy column in the MatchLytics Usage report: administrators, if MatchLytics-Management is enabled for your account.

Layout

Open Settings › Academy.

1. Academy – The tab summarizes the mandatory courses of your company and belongs to Settings. Only administrators may use it; if the system denies access, a notice appears instead of the list.
2. Open academy – Opens the Academy in a new browser tab, where you can look at the courses or take them yourself. The Controlboard handles the sign-in with a personal link that it creates anew at every click.
3. Note below the title – It says that the Controlboard picks up course completions from the Academy only once a day. A course that was just completed therefore only counts after the next pickup.
4. Mandatory courses – The list shows all courses that are mandatory for your company, with the columns Name, Type, Mandatory since, Attributes and Actions. These courses form the denominator in the Mandatory courses column of the user list, and archived courses do not count there.
5. Remove – The trash can icon in the Actions column opens a confirmation in which you confirm the removal. Afterwards the course is no longer mandatory, and the user list no longer counts it.
6. Add – The selection field and the button make another course a mandatory course. Only courses that are not archived and not yet mandatory are offered; new courses of the Academy appear only after the next daily pickup.

For each mandatory course the list shows:

Column	Content
Name	Name of the course. If the course has since been archived in the Academy, Archived appears next to it.
Type	Video course or SCORM course.
Mandatory since	Date since which the course has been mandatory.
Attributes	Duration (for example “45 min”), Exam or No exam, Certificate or No certificate. An attribute only appears if it is stored for the course. sense.AI.tion maintains the attributes, you cannot change them.
Actions	Trash can icon with the tooltip Remove.

If no mandatory courses have been defined yet, the list shows “No mandatory courses defined yet.”

Functions

Open the Academy

The Academy is the platform that hosts the courses of the sense.AI.tion Academy, including your mandatory courses. The Controlboard takes every signed-in user there with a personal sign-in link. The first time a user opens it, the Controlboard enrolls the user in the Academy with name and email address; through this enrollment it later assigns the course completions to the user.

There are two ways into the Academy:

• On the Applications page, click the Academy card.
• In the Academy tab, click Open academy at the top right.

The Academy appears on its start page. There is no link straight into a single course.

Links from the help and from the reminder email also lead to the Academy. They first open a Controlboard page with the text “Opening the academy …” and then forward you. If this fails, “The academy could not be opened. Please try again.” appears. Then click Try again or the link Back to the application overview.

Add a mandatory course

A mandatory course is a course that all users of your company are supposed to complete. The selection comes from the Academy’s catalog, which the Controlboard compares daily. As soon as a course is mandatory, the Mandatory courses column of the user list, the reminder about open courses and the Academy column in the report count it. Only administrators may define mandatory courses.

1. Open Settings › Academy.
2. Under the list, click the Add field and select a course. Typing narrows down the selection.
3. Click Add.

1. Add – This selection field shows the courses you can choose and filters them as soon as you type. Exactly one course is selected at a time.
2. Add – This button takes the selected course over as a mandatory course for your company. It is only active once you have selected a course.

“The mandatory course was added.” appears. The course is now in the list, and the user list counts it immediately. If a user has already completed it, the Controlboard takes the completion into account at the next daily pickup. Adding sends no email; you undo it with Remove a mandatory course.

Possible messages:

• “This course is already mandatory.”
• “This course is no longer available in the catalog.”

If the selection contains no course, there is currently no course that can become mandatory. Add then stays disabled.

Next: Pickup of completions, Mandatory courses in the user list.

Remove a mandatory course

A course no longer belongs in the list when it is no longer mandatory for your company or was archived in the Academy. The change applies to all users immediately: the user list and the reminder work without the course, and the report drops it after the next refresh. Only administrators may remove mandatory courses.

1. In the Actions column, click the trash can icon Remove of the course.
2. The confirmation Remove mandatory course opens: “Do you really want to remove “…” as a mandatory course? Completions already recorded stay in place.”
3. Click Remove. With Cancel, nothing changes.

1. Confirmation Remove mandatory course – The text names the course so that you can see which course you take out of the mandatory courses. Nothing changes until you confirm.
2. Cancel – Closes the confirmation without changing anything; the course stays mandatory.
3. Remove – Takes the course out of the mandatory courses of your company. The user list stops counting it immediately, the report after its next refresh.

“The mandatory course was removed.” appears. Archived mandatory courses no longer count as mandatory either, but they stay in the list until you remove them. Removing sends no email. The completions in the Academy stay in place, and the copy stored in the Controlboard is kept as well; it just no longer counts while the course is not mandatory. If you add the course again later, the completion counts again at once, and the next daily pickup compares the status with the Academy.

Pickup of completions

Courses and completions live in the Academy; the Controlboard picks up the progress in the mandatory courses once a day, at night. The Mandatory courses column of the user list, the reminders and the Academy column in the report are based on these picked-up completions. During the same pickup the Controlboard compares the catalog of selectable courses.

A course completion therefore does not appear immediately, but after the next pickup. In the report it follows with the next nightly run after the pickup. There is no button that starts the pickup right away.

Only completions of mandatory courses are picked up. If your company has no mandatory course, the Controlboard picks up no completions. A completion that was reached once stays valid, even if the Academy later extends the course. For blocked users the Controlboard picks up nothing. For users who have never opened the Academy through the Controlboard, the system looks them up in the Academy by their email address, at most once a week.

Mandatory courses in the user list

The user list shows administrators how many mandatory courses each user has already completed. The Controlboard calculates the values every time the list loads, from the mandatory courses of the company and the most recently picked-up completions. This way you see whom you should remind of open courses.

Open Company › User. If your company has no mandatory courses, the column shows “–”. The tooltip explains: “This customer has no mandatory courses defined”.

1. Mandatory courses – Shows “completed / required” for each user, for example “1 / 2”, with a progress bar. Required are the non-archived mandatory courses of your company.
2. Send mandatory course reminder – The envelope icon in the Additional Functions column opens the dialog for a reminder email to this user. It only appears while the user has open courses, and it is missing for system users and blocked users.

In the dialog for editing a user, the Course completions section lists the mandatory courses with the user’s status. Open courses carry the note “Not completed yet”, completed ones “completed by …”; the date is the day on which the Controlboard picked up the completion. The same envelope icon is there. Everything about the user list is on the page Users.

Send mandatory course reminder

The reminder is a single email to a user who still has mandatory courses open. The Controlboard never sends it automatically; it is only created when an administrator triggers it here. Which courses are open depends on the most recently picked-up completions.

1. In the user list, click the envelope icon in the Additional Functions column (tooltip Send mandatory course reminder).
2. The dialog Send mandatory course reminder? opens. It states the progress, for example “… has not yet completed all mandatory courses (1 / 2). A reminder email will be sent.”
3. Select an email template in the Template field. A template whose name contains “Standard” is preselected, otherwise the first template in the list.
4. Click Send reminder.

“The reminder has been sent” appears. The email goes to the address of the user, not to you. The standard version points out that not all mandatory courses are completed yet, names the open courses in a line “Open mandatory courses: …” and contains the button Go to the academy, which leads into the Academy via the Controlboard. A selected template replaces this text; the names of the open courses then only appear in it if the template inserts the placeholder {VALUE_3}. The language of the email follows the selected template, otherwise the document language of the company (Settings › Customer, field Language). A reminder that has been sent cannot be taken back.

You maintain the templates for the action Reminder email for open mandatory Academy courses under Emails and templates. No reminder is possible for blocked users (“This user is locked”). If a user has meanwhile completed all mandatory courses, “This user has already completed all mandatory courses, or the customer no longer has any” appears.

Academy column in the report

The MatchLytics Usage report shows for each team how many members have completed all mandatory courses. The figure is based on the same picked-up completions as the user list, but it is only updated when the system calculates the report again. This way you see at a glance in which team courses are still open, and the group icon shows who is missing.

The Academy column (Company › Reports) shows “x / n”: x counts the active members who have completed all mandatory courses, n all active members of the team. If your company has no mandatory courses, it shows “–” with the tooltip “No mandatory courses defined.” More on the page Reports.

Notes

Because the pickup only runs once a day, a reminder can reach a user who has only just completed the course.

Use sense.AI.tion products

If you would like to use products, tools and/or services from sense.AI.tion GmbH, you will find the necessary information on prices, demo access and downloads at sense.AI.tion