How to Activate and Manage Learning Plans

Last Updated

July 29th, 2019

Reading Time

6 min

User Level

Introduction

Docebo allows you to create a learning plan to assign to individual users, organization chart branches or groups. Learning Plans consist of a list of courses that the user must follow in a specific order. These plans can be customized to allow specific enrollment rules, course purchases, certifications, and much more. Let’s see how.

This functionality is a core feature of Docebo, available to all clients.

Configuring Global Settings for Learning Plans

Begin by configuring the settings for all learning plans. Login as the Superadmin, then access the Admin Menu from the gear icon in the top right corner of the page. Click on Advanced Settings in the Settings section and move to the Learning Plan section. In the Redirect Behavior section on the Settings page, you can flag the option to redirect the learner to the Learning Plan page after completing any course inside a learning plan.

Please note that this only works if the platform is able to identify from which learning plan a user is coming. When you’re finished press Save Changes.

Creating a Learning Plan

To create a learning plan, access the Admin Menu, then press the Learning Plan item in the E-Learning section. On the next page, you’ll see the New Learning Plan button in the action bar at the top of the page, and a list of learning plans below. Press the New Learning Plan button to get started. In the pop up box, you will see three tabs: Details, Settings, and Share.

In the Details tab, complete the form with the name, description, and code (optional) of the learning plan, then choose a thumbnail or upload your own. Then, move to the Settings tab. In this tab, flag whether you want to show the learning plan in the courses catalog. If you flag this option, then a fourth tab, E-Commerce, will populate. In the Settings tab, enter the days of validity of the learning plan, allowing users to access it for only a specific number of days after they are enrolled in it. There are two different options for counting the number of days:

After First Course Access. The number of days are calculated from the first time a user accesses the course or learning plan. For learning plans, this means a user’s first access for any course inside the learning plan.

After Being Enrolled in the Learning Plan. The number of days are calculated at the time of the user’s enrollment, not after the user’s first access of the course or learning plan. If a user is waiting to be approved into a course or learning plan (due to a pending E-Commerce payment or waiting for Admin approval), the validity period starts from the date of the approved enrollment. If you flag this option, along with the option to also update all enrollments expiration dates where users already started this course, then your LMS will perform a massive expiration date recalculation based on enrollment dates, rather than the first course access date.

If you have flagged the option to set the validity date After Being Enrolled in the Learning Plan, the option to Also update all enrollments expiration dates where users already started this course will be changed to Also update all enrollments expiration dates for users already enrolled in this course.

If Coach & Share is enabled in your system, you can also select in which channel(s) you want to place the learning plan. Finally, assign certificates, certifications, and credits to your learning plan, if desired.

Please Note: Certificates for learning plans are issued only when a user has completed ALL of the courses within a learning plan. This also applies if a learner is only enrolled in a few, but not all, of the courses within a learning plan.

Move to the Share tab, where you can flag the option to enable deep linking for the learning plan. This means that you can create a link from within the platform to share with your users outside of the platform. When users click on this link from an external website, they will automatically be enrolled into the learning plan.

If you have selected the Show this learning plan in the course catalog option in the Settings tab, then you can also configure the settings in the E-Commerce tab. Select the Put this learning plan on sale option if you want to sell the learning plan. You can then decide the price of the learning plan as well as determine if the learning plan must be bought in full or if courses can be bought individually. In the latter case, the final price will be the sum of each single course selected. The currency in which the course is offered is configured in the E-Commerce settings.

Press Confirm to finish creating your new learning plan.

You can Edit or Delete a learning plan by clicking on the corresponding icons in the learning plan’s row.

Assigning Courses to your Learning Plan

In order to assign a course to your learning plan, press the icon in the Courses column in the learning plan’s row (in the list of learning plans on the management page). In the pop up box, flag which courses you want to add to the plan, then press Confirm.

The platform will display the list of courses as originally selected, but you can change the order of the courses by pressing the Move icon (the crossing arrows), then dragging and dropping the courses according to the order that you need. You can also define learning paths through a selection of prerequisites.

For example, to access a second course, you will have to complete the first one. In the Prerequisites area, you can choose to unlock a course only after the user has completed the previous one. Select the course you would like to be the prerequisite of another course, then press Confirm. You can also define time-based prerequisites (e.g. the third course of the learning plan will be available 3 days after the second course has been completed). Repeat the process for all of the courses included in the plan, as desired.

Assigning Users to a Learning Plan

After creating a learning plan, you then need to assign users to it. To do so, select the icon in the Assigned Users column of a learning plan’s row (in the list of learning plans on the management page). In the pop up box, you can flag individual users, groups, branches, or roles. Press Confirm to complete the process.

Please note: When you are selecting branches of users of your organization chart to enroll in a learning plan, please note that in order to make it easier and faster to select branches, you will see a text input field to type in branch names rather than a list of branches to select if you have more than 1,000 branches in your platform.

To learn more about how users can access and navigate learning plans, refer to this article. If you added the learning plan into a course catalog, users will be able to buy the learning plan or enroll themselves into it (depending on the settings of the course catalog and the learning plan itself). Please note that when users unenroll from a learning plan, they don’t unenroll from the courses within the learning plan.

Best Practices

Use a learning plan when:

You need to generate blended training
You have a huge course to divide into smaller ones

For a better experience, it is recommended that:

You keep the learning plan description as short as possible, in order to be more focused on the list of courses in the learning plan first page
You create a training material (e.g. HTML page) containing an introduction of the learning plan in the first course and a training material containing a conclusion in the last course
You set prerequisites in a clear and understandable way for the user, especially if a classroom and an e-learning course are included in the learning plan

Manage different certifications within the same Learning Plan:

If desired, it is possible to create a Learning Plan with different certifications assigned to it. In order to do that, assign the certifications created with the Certification and Retraining app to the courses included into the Learning Plan, not at Learning Plan level. For example, you can setup a Learning Plan including an e-learning course with an annual renewal and a classroom course with three-year renewal.