The v14 release comes with lots of improvements and new features! 🥳 To name just a few: Compliance courses, Course reset, the new role Direct Manager, new Automation rules, and much more. Here's the complete list:

Course creation and Course settings:

Compliance courses

New Course creation flow and Course cover image

Improved Course settings menu layout

Updated Course information tab

Add a custom course completion image

Course reset: Let your learners redo the course

Scheduled blocks – updated layout

Redesign of activity drop indicator

Enhanced spacing between activities

Teams:

New role! Direct Manager Role and Teams

Automation:

New conditions and actions for automation rules

Resend the Welcome to Learnster message

New notification for automatic enrollment approval

Integration:

Customer-facing API

SAML Studio Interface

Other

"Compliance courses" is a new feature for recurring courses that users need to retake periodically. Typically, these are courses needed for certain certifications for food and health, financial, insurance, and other types of compliance, but can be any course that you want your users to retake periodically.

When enabling a Compliance Course, the first thing you need to decide and configure is the Compliance and Retake periods.

The Compliance Period is the number of days the user is compliant for once finishing the course. For instance, if you set the Compliance Period to 365 days and a user finishes the course on May 6th 2022, the user will be compliant until May 6th 2023.

The Retake Period is the period during which the system should notify the user that the compliance period for the course is starting to run out and it's time to retake the course. If you, for instance, set the period to 90 days, Learnster will move the course to the user's Ongoing Courses and start prompting the user that it's time to retake the course 90 days before the course compliance runs out. Per the example above, if the course compliance period runs our May 6th 2023, Learnster will move the course to the user's ongoing courses on February 5th 2023.

There are three notifications connected to recertifications.

By default, users that don't redo courses set for recertification will stay on users My Courses and the users will keep being enrolled in the course. By enabling the Remove Learner Once Compliance Expires setting, you can let Learnster automatically remove users that haven't re-certified after X days. When Learnster removes the user, by default the "Course participant removed after compliance period expiration" notification is sent. You can also choose to send a custom message.

The course creation flow in Learnster has a new look! 🤩 To create a course, you simply add a course name and a cover image, and then you're ready to go!

And, the course now has its own hero image (a big image on top of the course information section). We've also added features making it possible to reposition the cover image, add a color overlay, and change text color.

We've also updated the course settings menu layout to make it easier to find course content, information, settings, and other options. The menu is now located on top of the screen with sub-menus on the left of the screen.

In the tab Information, you can add course description, course length, instructor name, and other information that you want to share with your learners.

The course information tab is "mirrored" to look the same way in U as it does in Studio. This way the Course Designer knows exactly what the learner sees and is able to keep the learner's perspective in mind when adding course information.

Here's how the course information looks in 1) Learnster Studio and 2) Learnster U.

This is a highly anticipated feature that we're happy to provide! 🎉 You're now able to upload your own course completion image! 🥳 That is the image that will show when a learner has completed a course.

To upload, go to Course settings > General and scroll down to Course completion image and click Upload image to use an image from your computer, or click Search image to use an image from your Learnster Library or Unsplash stock photos.

In Course settings, you can now choose to allow learners to reset and redo courses they've already completed. Important to keep in mind is that if a Learner resets their course progress, previously finished sessions are preserved in user's course history but the course status will be reset under course > Learners (with Progress 0%) and the course will be "moved" to "My Courses" for the Learner (with reset progress).

If you activate the Reset feature, your learners can go to their Course History, hover over the completed course, and click "Redo" to take the course again.

When adding a new scheduled block there's an updated layout when selecting the time and date for a scheduled event. This will make it easier to add the correct time and date to scheduled blocks.

When adding new scheduled blocks to a published course with enrolled Learners we've also added the option "Send email update to enrolled learners". This allows you to choose whether you want to send notifications or not on individual block level. This should come in handy when updating ongoing courses with new scheduled events.

The activity drop indicator when adding course content also has a new look! 🌟 With the updated design and functionality, it's now easier to add your activity types where you want them on the page.

You can now also add an activity to the page by simply clicking on it! So, just click the activity type icon you want to add, instead of dragging and dropping it, and it will be added to the bottom of your page.

As we redesigned the activity drop indicator we were also able to adjust the spacing between activities. Now spacing is the same in Studio and U to make sure that your Course Designers have the same view as the Learners.

Direct Manager is a new role that comes with additional functionality to assign Direct Manager and Direct Reports on all user cards. When assigning a Direct Manager to your users, a Direct Manager Team is automatically created. The team functionality is the same for regular teams as for Direct Manager Teams but in a Direct Manager Team, there's only one single Team Manager, which is the Direct Manager. The team will only consist of the Direct Manager's Direct Reports.

Here's a quick overview of how the features look in Learnster Studio in the User menu and on the User card:

As a super-admin, you're able to adjust the role permissions for your Direct Managers just as with all other roles.

One of the permissions you can give your Direct Managers is to approve course enrollments requests from their Direct Reports. In your Course Settings, you can then choose if you want to notify the Direct Managers when their Direct Reports send an enrollment request.

There are two new conditions added to the Automation rules:

With these conditions, you can easily target your active users with actions but also all your users who have never logged in. Simply put a NOT before these conditions and it will trigger for users that have never logged in or who haven't logged in for the last x days.

The new action "Resend welcome notification" will send out the "Welcome to Learnster" message that is automatically sent out to users when you add them to your Learnster platform. Therefore, this action can simply be performed on users that have never logged in. Hence, this action works best in combination with our new condition to trigger for your users that have never logged in💡.

You can also choose to resend the "Welcome to Learnster" message without using automation rules. This is a lot easier if you only have a handful of users that have never logged in. Go to the User menu and click on Never logged in. Mark the users you want to send the message to and click Resend invitation.

For courses in the catalog, we've now created two separate notifications for Manual and Automatic enrollment approval. This allows you to customize and adjust your messages depending on if their request is approved automatically by the system or manually by an actual person. You can of course also choose to turn off the notification for automatic enrollment approval. This has been requested since learners are added to the course immediately if there's no active waitlist for the course.

Creation of a well-developed and stable customer-facing API that our clients have access to (more detailed information to come).

We've added a Studio interface for SSO settings. This allows super-admins to set up and configure SSO without assistance from us at Learnster (more detailed information to come).

That's it for now! We hope you will enjoy these improvements and new features! 💜

Read about the Learnster U v14 updates