Webinars (sections) within a Certification Product Workflow
Is there a way to accomplish this workflow within a certification product? We are trying to group these requirements into a certificate product to avoid asking users to self-enroll in a number of separate learning products from a catalog, but we need to maintain a lot of flexibility to mix and match webinar sessions. The learning product groups within Certifications just enroll a user in the default section of the product. Ideally we'd want them to follow the workflow of a certification, but be able to self-select the section for each learning product that has multiple sections for scheduled webinars, or live classroom events.
Sample
- Requirement 1 -- Learning Product #1; standard, self-paced (videos & assessments)
- Requirement 2 -- Learning Product #2; webinar (potentially 5-10 sections) -- the product above is a prerequisite
- Requirement 3 -- Learning Product #3; webinar (potentially 5-10 sections) -- the product above is a prerequisite
- Requirement 4 -- Final Assessment/Exam (within the certification product itself)
2 Responses
Matt, I think what you are suggesting makes sense, especially as we get into more instructor led types of content. Both the instructor led customization content and certification/subscriptions were envisioned in different contexts, but we knew they'd probably be used in ways we didn't anticipate. The Webinar activity definitely has room to make it more robust. There are a few gaps in the implementation. How does a learner know when one has been scheduled? How do you represent "TBD" times? etc. We are likely to re-evaulate how we can make improvements to meet these scenarios.
A couple possible workarounds for now. Let's just consider Learning Product #2 webinar.
If I understand, you want to offer that webinar at 10 different dates/times and the learner can attend any one of these and get completion for that activity/product.
In LP #2, you could have a block, with 10 webinar activities, and set the block to require only one of those activities to be completed. Each activity is a webinar, and then in the section admin page you can set a different time for each. Once the learner has attended at least one of those webinar activities, the block will complete, and completing the learning product, assuming the block of webinars is the only thing in that learning product. You could leave some
If you do not schedule a time for a webinar in the section admin, a learner attempting to launch it will get a "Activity has not been enabled." message. Once you've set a date/time for it, then they will see that when they launch into the webinar. (If you know these date/times far in advance, it might be a good idea to set that in the activity title and publish, so learners can see what is upcoming. Otherwise the learner has to click each activity to see the date/time it is scheduled for.)
I think this might even be advantageous over making the learner pick a section in advance, because the above allows them to change their mind about which date/time to attend and not commit to it when joining a section. This scenario is a little bit like live classrooms, and we found we needed to accommodate people who needed to be allowed to attend a different session "at the last minute" than the one they were assigned in their section.
The other option I think is less desirable, which involves a single webinar activity, but rescheduling it periodically after each session.
Here's the catch to this and why I wouldn't like this workaround. The purpose of the attendance code is to allow the instructor the option to provide that during the meeting, and learners who perhaps were all in a conference room watching the conference on a projector from one learner's account, then can take that attendance code and login to their own account and use it to get a completion. If you Edit the meeting schedule and set a new time, learners from the previous session who did not join the conference but watched from another's screen, won't be able to enter an attendance code until the next scheduled time. So, you'd need to wait some period of time after the webinar, or simply don't give out attendance codes and advise instructors to ask students to launch from their own machines to ensure they get the completion.
Goal for a Better Solution
What would be the ideal solution?
Single section - I think the learner would launch into a single activity, and see a list of scheduled webinar date/times. So the activity representing the "Learning to Cook Pasta" webinar would have a way to set multiple date/times from the section admin page, instead of just one. The only problem with this: if the Product also includes other instructor gradeable activities AND you want to have a different instructor for each different group of learners, then you really want learners in separate sections.
Multiple sections - If you do partition by section instead, then learners need to commit to the section in advance, and only have the option of attending the date/times scheduled in that section which that instructor is offering.
Hybrid -
Section A administered by Dr. Bob, who offers the Pasta webinar 1/31 2 PM and 2/4 8 PM
Section B administered by Dr. Sarah, who offers the same webinar at 2/3 8 AM and 2/6 8 AM (she's a morning person)
Learners are placed into a certain section, and only their section admin can grade their activities, but for the purpose of webinars, they can attend either instructors webinar. I.e. when the learner views the webinar activity, it can "see" across all sections to show a list of all available date/times. This probably wouldn't work if lectures are a important part of the course and Learners have to "get used to" their instructors lecturing technique. Not sure what kind of webinar content we are talking about though.
This doesn't solve the problem of assigning product sections nested inside a certification. We've usually encouraged enrollment codes as a way to tie users to a specific section if that is important, which doesn't help us here.
What are your webinars like? Is it critical that learners are divided up into sections in advance, so they "stick" with a particular section admin throughout the certification across the products? Or does it not matter at what point they make the choice, or which instructor they get, just as long as the learner has a way to choose the webinar datetime they want?
AaronLS
3That's a great point about last minute session changes. We definitely need flexibility to allow for rescheduling -- unless there is a long term plan for expanding sections in some way to allow this, it would be a big stumbling block.
The hybrid solution is interesting, but for our short term needs the single section option probably works best. We have no concerns at this point over multiple instructors -- flexibility with the webinar time within the certification workflow is the driving issue. This option seems to be the next step from your proposed workaround of just listing 10 webinar activites in the product, and requiring only 1 to be completed. We would just need to be able to periodically add new webinar times without disrupting the users, and potentially report on who attended each webinar session.
