Starting a few sprints back we started making a transition towards making everything to be just a product (which includes conferences and subscriptions). The benefits of this on the back end are tremendous, and for your customers it means they can now easily enroll and purchase these products from Learner Community leveraging catalog capabilities as the products are now marketable in the same manner as regular learning products.

With Sprint 56 we are adding a new product type in Learner Community called Certification Products. This new type will allow you to offer a certification level to your learners upon completing a set of requirements (which will be valid for a certain amount of time). The requirements will be composed from other learning products which allows you to define essentially a learning plan for your learners with the end goal of a certification.

With this new product type, and the recent changes to subscription, the existing enrollments widget needs to be updated to take advantage of the features available in these products. Rather than having things broken up into disperse areas, making everything sortable under the Enrollments area now just makes sense. Below is a summary of the improvements coming to the Enrollments Widget in Sprint 56:

  1. The Enrollments area will now show subscriptions directly without the need for the separate area above the Enrollments area. enrollments header
  2. The Enrollments area will now be sorted by the most recently access first, instead of by title.
    • Enrollments not yet launched will be shown first, followed by the most recently accessed.
    • This will eliminate the need for the sometimes confusing Recent and New area at the top of the widget because the items that would have gone there will be listed at the top of the Enrollments area.
  3. We will keep track of which sort tab the learner is using (recent, newest, title, status, close date), so if they prefer to see enrollments listed by title, our system will remember that preference.

So in the end, with the addition coming for these certification products, our goal is to make the enrollments widget simpler to use and easier to navigate. :)

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  • Matt Kamen

    Adam - will subscriptions and the associated courses belonging to the subscription all be listed separately under Enrollments? Or will there be some sort of hierarchy? For example, if we have a subscription with 3 products, will a user now see 4 separate line items under Enrollments? Or will they see only the subscription in Enrollments and then the 3 products after drilling down into the subscription?

    For certifications, will we be able to include the certification's expiration date on the certificate?

  • Adam Spicer

    Matt, for a subscription we will show underneath the top 3 most recent products that are in progress. Clicking on the subscription, like today will all remain the same and take the user to the subscription detail page. In your example, if a user only has a subscription, and has enrolled in 3 products from the subscription, there will only be ONE main entry under Enrollments. Those 3 products will then be listed by title underneath its subscription.

    Yes, the expiration date for a certification will be available for its certificate.

  • Dave Hecker

    Using a slightly different example for added clarity: imagine a subscription that contains 10 learning products, and the learner has viewed 7 of them.
    TODAY: The subscription itself is an item under the a "Subscriptions" heading, and the 7 enrollments show as 7 separate items under the "Enrollments" heading.
    PLANNED: The subscription itself will become a single entry under the "Enrollments" heading; the 7 enrollments will no longer be shown as 7 separate items. The subscription item will likely list the top 3 most recently-viewed learning products (that are part of the subscription).
    UNCHANGED: Clicking the subscription itself will still navigate to the subscription detail page, which will list all 10 learning products that are part of the subscription (of which 7 will have a "View Enrollment" action; 3 will have an "Enroll Now" action).

  • Matt Kamen

    Great - thanks Adam and Dave!

  • Jim Apistolas

    This change seems to be making everything much more complicated for the user. We utilize the subscriptions, party because they are listed separated from the enrollments. It's possible for one of our members to have hundreds of enrollments if they attend multiple conferences. In addition, our confirmation email text for our various products references where to find their subscription. We need a little more lead time to make all these changes.

  • Adam Spicer

    Jim, with subscriptions now being "products" at their core, we now can use them much in the same manner as products. They have things now like catalog capabilities, an icon, product detail page with a preview video and ecommerce enrollment options.
    At the same time we are adding yet another category of products to learner community (certifications) with the potential more even more in the future. Rather than building out a separate area for each of these categories (learning products, conferences, assignments, subscriptions, and now certifications) we are making a considerable effort to use the main enrollments area as much as possible. When a user comes to that page, they won't have to look through potentially 5 different areas, rather everything they need is shown in one area that is easily sortable to quickly find what they are looking for.
    I can appreciate the request for more lead time, and in the future we will try to get this information to you as quickly as possibly.

  • Matt Kamen

    Adam - are assignments also moving to the enrollments area as part of this sprint?

  • Adam Spicer

    Matt, As assignments are *requirements* that must be done, they differ drastically in their purpose from all other product classes and will retain their area above the enrollments area for now.

  • Jim Apistolas

    Thanks for the reply Adam. This change is both good and bad - but the good will probably outweigh the bad in the end - we just need adequate time to communicate changes. Don't forget - our members think we have made a mistake when the actual experience differs from the instructions that we've provided.

  • Adam Spicer

    We weren't able to get the end user side of certifications completed in time for this sprint, which makes the enrollments widget change less important. As a result we will be able to keep the separate "subscriptions" area as is for now.

    Thanks everyone for your input in this topic. We've had a lot of discussion internally and with some of you individual on how to best handle the categorization of enrollments, and we've been able to come up with a much better solution that lets each organization control it themselves. Additionally, you will be able to phase in the solution at your own pace. Next week we will start a new discussion on the topic to share with you the plans. We are expecting it to be ready in a couple weeks, just in time for the next sprint release.

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