Courses

Cover & banner for courses

A picture speaks a thousand words and can enhance your courses attractiveness when displayed in the learner area. For a new or existing course, while being logged into the Administration panel, just click on Course details > Edit.

For a cover picture, click on Select cover and upload a png or jpeg (for best results we recommend the following dimensions: 330x220). 

Additionally, you can decide to also upload a banner (preferred dimensions: 990x250) by clicking on Select banner and uploading your jpg or png file.

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Here's how the end result will look like in the learner area. The cover image will identify the course on all listings, like for example here in the Cockpit:

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The banner will identify the course on its detail page:

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Promotional courses

Sometimes you want to grab your learners attention with a new course that they can book themselves. Such courses can be set up as promotional. Here's how to do it:

Log into the Administration panel > Courses and select your desired course. There are 3 conditions that need to be met in order to create a promo course:

  1. The course has a banner
  2. The toggle "Assignable" is activated (which means that learners can simply book the course themselves, without prior assignment through an administrator)
  3. The toggle "Display in promotional box" is activated

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If these conditions are met the banner of the course will be prominently displayed on the top of the Cockpit page in the learner area. If several courses have been marked as promotional, the banners will slide every 5s in a carousel

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Bookable/assigned courses

Some of the courses you only want to make available to selected learners: you assign them the course, but learners themselves cannot search or book this course by themselves. Neither can they sign out of the course assigned by them by an administrator.

However, for other courses you might want learners themselves to discover & book the course, akin to the procedure described here

Once the learner discovers the course & accesses the detail view of it, he can book it and gain access to the course's learning contents.

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Once booked, the course status changes to "booked" and the user gets the possibility to give up on taking the course by clicking on the Stornieren button

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If an admininistrator assigns this course to a learner, the learner can still cancel the booking at any time. So if you want to assign mandatory courses to your learner group, you need to make sure that the "assignable" toggle is deactivated in the course detail page in the Administration Panel

Certificate Courses

For some of your courses you might want to issue a certificate upon course completion. 2 options are available for this:

Issuing a certificate for a course

Once you have created a certificate course and learners have taken and completed the course, if you haven't chosen the "create automatically" option, you will need to create the certificates manually.

In the certificate course, go to Assigned persons / Completed (as this would only list the persons who can be issued a certificate), click on the dropdown Actions and select the option Create certificate

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Select a specific person or all persons from the list and click on the Create certificate button. The certificate will be generated and the learner will get a notification to alert him to this, with a direct link to the certificate in his profile.

As an administrator, you can also see the certificates, either:

Management of course certificates

Download certificate(s)

Delete certificate(s)

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1. Administrators can delete all certificates from a person's profile (manually generated, automatically generated at course completion, imported certificates)
2. Learners can only delete manually generated certificates by an administrator and imported certificates (either imported by themselves or by the administrator). Automatically generated certificates cannot be deleted by the person in his/her profile

Import certificate

If you would like to import a certificate (only pdf upload available), search the Person in the Person administration, go to the Certificates tab, click the Functions button and select Import

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Select the desired pdf file, enter a certificate title and click on Import. The certificate will be listed along all the other certificates for this user.

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Special cases for certificate courses

What happens with prior bookings if I transform a course to a certificate course? Will they automatically get issued a certificate as well?

No. If you change the course to a certificate course after learners have already completed the course, you will have to issue the certificates manually (see Certificate Course). 

Users assigned to the course after the change will be automatically issued with a certificate if you've chosen the automatic issuing of certificates (see Certificate Course).

Create a course manually

As an administrator, you can easily create a course manually: go into the Administration Panel > Contents > Courses and click on New course.

An empty form will open, where you need to:

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Important:

  1. Only courses with status "Activated" are fully available to the learners
  2. A course must contain at least one course content to be assignable to a person.
  3. When course contents are removed from booked courses, at least one course content must remain in the course.
  4. If you want your learners to see their results in relation to other learners' progress, you can activate the benchmark feature
  5. To enable learners to discover your course, you can tag the course with relevant keywords and make sure to save it as "assignable"
  6. You can define the course as assignable or as a certificate course

Create courses automatically by uploading SCORM files

For SCORM files, you can automatically create a course during upload. Access the Administration panel > Courses and click on the Functions button

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Select the option "Upload course content", click on "Select" and upload the desired SCORM zip file. You will notice that the option "Create course automatically with" ist pre-selected.

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Clicking on "Upload" will automatically create a course containing this one learning object, as the SCORM file is automatically recognised.

Add learning objects to your course

Once you have added some learning objects to your Swiss Learning Hub instance, you will want to make these available to the learners. Therefore, learning objects need to be added to your manually created courses or they can complement SCORM files in existing courses.

Simply access the Administration Panel > Courses and click on the course you would like to add content to from the listing.

In the course detail view, on the menu to the left, click on Used course contents and click on Add.

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Either type in the pop-up the title of the learning object or search for it by using the filters for Language / Type / Status / Platform, select the radiobutton of the found available learning object and click Add.

You will see the learning object added to the list.

Alternative path

You can also directly assign a learning object to a course as follows: in the Administration panel, go to Contents > Course contents and select the desired learning object. In its detail view go to Used courses and click Add. Search for a course you wish to add this content to, select it in the Search pop-up and click Add

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The course will be added in the list under Used courses.

Learning progress changes when adding/removing contents from a course

You can add or remove learning content from a course at any time. There are some important considerations to make when doing that. Learning progress information will be automatically recalculated when a new learning object is added to / removed from a course.

Courses with the "Completed" status will be set back to "Being processed" once new content is added to a course.

The reverse can also be true: when course contents are removed from a course, after the recalculation, the course status of "Being processed" can change into "Completed" if the removed content was the one not yet completed by the learner.

When a course content is removed from a course, the existing learning progress information related to this course content is lost and can no longer be retrieved.

How learning object status influences the overall course status

In the following table we will try to illustrate how the combination of various learning object statuses within the same course will influence the course status for a specific learner.

This is the course status you might see when generating a report for the learning progress of people enrolled in the course.

Not attempted Incomplete Failed Passed Complete Course status
At least 1 learning object 0 0 0 0 not attempted
any At least 1 learning object any any any incomplete
0 0 At least 1 learning object any any failed
0 0 0 At least 1 learning object any passed
0 0 0 0 any complete

Just to give a few examples:

Manual adjustment of status/score of a learning object

If manual adjustments of the course content score/status are needed, this can be accomplished as follows:

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Course setup

Grouping of learning objects in course

Some courses might have a large amount of learning objects contained, making it hard for the learner to orient him-/herself within the course. He might be wondering: need I start at the top? Can I pick any learning content and start from there? Logical groupings of content within a course can help learners with such decisions and are a great way for you to organise your course.

In the Administration panel, you can go to the Used course contents area in the detail page of the course in the Administration panel, then click on the Actions dropdown and select Organisation. Click on the New group button and type in the name of the first content grouping (ex. Introduction).

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Via drag & drop you can then move this grouping header at any position among the learning objects: all contents below it will be now part of this grouping. You can repeat the process for as many groupings as you deem necessary & Save, so that your course page might look something like this:

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For the learner, this allows him to visually organise the detail page of the course: he can collapse the sections he has not reached yet and keep an eye on the expanded area where he is currently actively learning

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Status, results & elapsed time

Courses come in all colors and flavors, with some content extremely relevant for the final result and other content optional or meant to enrich the learning experience. How can you reflect these different weighings on your course setup?

In the Administration panel, go to the detail page of your course and access the Used course contents area, then click on the Actions dropdown and select Define course influence. By default, when adding course content to a course, all 3 options are activated: relevance to Status, Results, Elapsed time learning. But let's look at an example:

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Let's say that for this course you would like to accomplish the following:

Therefore, your final setup might look like this: img NOTE: Every time these setting are changed, the course status of the entire course will be recalculated for each learner

Strict order of learning content

You've uploaded several learning objects to your Swiss Learning Hub instance and have started creating courses with them. You might be wondering which options are available to you in terms of the order of the learning objects and their influence on the course status or overall result. Let's take a look at some of the details.

For some courses, you would like your learners to take a liniar approach, for example go through some instructional learning content and then take a test to prove their knowledge or newly aquired skills. You can enforce this by accessing the Used course contents area in the detail page of the course in the Administration panel, then clicking on the Actions dropdown and selecting Organisation

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Via drag & drop you can define the desired order of the learning objects, then you need to select the "Strictly comply with sequence" radiobutton and Save.

As you can see from the image below, the effect this has for the learner is that he can access and progress to the second learning content only if he completes the first one. This way you can ensure that all learners progress in the same order within the course.

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Benchmarking / Performance comparison

Depending on the learning objectives of your course, sometimes you may decide to increase learner motivation by showing them a comparison of their own perfomance in relation to that of other learners enrolled in the same course and in relation to a mastery score (for SCORM files). 

The setup in the Administration Panel is as follows: go to Contents > Courses and select the target course. Under Course details, click Edit and activate the toggle for "Benchmarking visible"

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Performance comparisons are only possible for SCORM learning objects that have been defined as being [relevant for the course overall score](https://docs.swisslearninghub.help/books/corporate-learning-en/page/course-setup). Other types of learning objects will not be taken into consideration, as there is no scoring information available for them.

On the course detail page the learner can then access the performance diagramms:

As can be seen below, each SCORM content displays the average value of already obtained scores of learners who have completed that content, alongside the expected mastery score and the learner's own performance. 

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The comparison over a single learning object within the course is possible in the content detail view page.

You can finegrain the data displayed by additionally selecting a start date for the benchmarking. This will only display data for learners that have been assigned the course on and after the set date. Your configuration would look as follows:

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Course assignments

There are 2 main options for course assignment: from the Courses or the Persons screen.

Course status

Courses in Swiss Learning Hub can be activated, deactivated or archived. 

Activated courses:

Deactivated courses:

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In the learner course detail view from above, you can notice that the learning objects are greyed out and the Run buttons are hidden from view. The course cannot be actively processed by the learner.

Archived courses:

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As you can see above, the "Assign" button is missing from the Assigned persons area. However, all persons that have taken the course are still displayed, which allows you to keep all learning progress information.

Edit a course

Oftentimes you have uploaded a SCORM file whose details you would like to edit or the information in a course is simply outdated. These are your editing possibilities in Swiss Learning Hub when you access Course details > Edit:

  1. Descriptive information: You can change the title, course_id, abstract and description of a course. You can also add or delete keywords to enhance the searchability of a course. 
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  2. Status: You can change the course status to affect its visibility / access for the learners
  3. Learners perfomance benchmarks: depending on whether you want to enable comparisons with other's learners achievements, you can activate or deactivate the benchmark feature
  4. Promo: You can set a course up as promotional
  5. Certificate: You can set a course up as offering a certificate upon its completion

Review mode

Review mode for administrators

The review mode allows you to gain insight into the status and learning progress information of a SCORM 1.2 course content for a particular person, without changing learning progress information. This means that you can see the answers of the learner or the pages he has already visited, without actually being able to change any responses or statuses within the module ("read-only" mode).

Access review mode from Person detail page

To view the status and learning progress information of a course content of a particular person,

Access review mode from Course detail page

The review mode button to reload the status and learning progress information of a reset course content is displayed under "Course registrations" on the "Course content" screen.

The course content can only be started, if it has been uploaded as a SCORM 1.2 file. Opening the module in this mode allows the administrator to browse through all pages, questions with their answers and solutions, irrespective if the Test review has been permitted or not in the STAGE authoring tool. The data that has already been saved in Tracker cannot be changed.

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For a correct funtioning of the review mode of STAGE Modules, these should have been created with at least STAGE-Version 1.15.5.

Review mode for learners

The administrator can also grant access to the review mode to the learner, who may see all his answers and the correct solutions.

Starting from Persons:

An alternative route to the same end is also possible starting from the Contents screen, similar to the process described at review-mode-for-administrators.

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When the user logs in and visits his course page, he will see the review button for the module he has been granted access to. Via this button he can also open the course content in "read-only" mode, so that he can see his answers and the suggested solutions, without being able to modify them anymore.

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When the review mode ends, the administrator can revoke the access rights for the learner. By following the same steps as described for the first screen, he now needs to select the option "Revoke sharing of course content review" in the Actions dropdown and then save this option for the course content.

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