Version 18 of Learnster is here, and it offers a healthy mix of both new features and improvements to existing functionality. With Smart Enrollment as the highlight of this release, there are also additions to discover in the compliance functionality, role permissions, and language support. As always – we hope you will like it! 🤓

Learnster Studio:

Smart Enrollment

Compliance Functionality Improvements

Course Assignment Permissions

Learnster U:

Support for Baltic Languages

Smart Enrollment is a new functionality that allows you to automatically assign courses to your Learners based on user attributes. Instead of adding single learners or creating advanced automation rules, you can now define specific user groups that you want to enroll in the course.

Once you've activated Smart Enrollment and set your criteria, the course will automatically be assigned to the Learners who meet the criteria. And any future Learner who meets the criteria will automatically be enrolled in the course as soon as the criteria are fulfilled.

The Smart Enrollment feature is found under the Learners tab on each course. Click the arrow and choose "Auto-enrollment" to open the Smart Enrollment interface and choose your enrollment criteria. You are, of course, still able to manually enroll single learners as well 😊.

To decide which Learners should be enrolled in the course, you need to set your enrollment criteria. The enrollment criteria are unique for this course, and you can choose different criteria for all your courses. Criteria consist of one or multiple user attributes, which can be combined to create a group criteria. To meet the criteria, a Learner needs to have the chosen user attributes assigned to them.

A single criteria is when the Learner only needs to have one of the single user attributes to be attributed to the course.

For example, if I add the Team "Marketing" as a single criteria, all members of the Team will be enrolled in the course. I can then add another single criteria, such as Team "Sales." Then all Learners that are members of either Team "Marketing" or "Sales" will be enrolled in the course. The Learner simply needs to meet one of the single criteria that's been added to be enrolled in the course.

Use the left-side menu to search and browse among the existing user attributes. Once you find the correct attribute, just click it and it will be added to the list of enrollment criteria for the course.

A group criteria is very useful and flexible when you want to define a more specific user group where a single user attribute just isn't enough. You can add multiple user attributes into one group criteria, and to be enrolled in the course, the Learner must have all user attributes within the group (not just one).

For example, if you instead only want to add the Swedish members of Team "Sales" to the course. Then you can create a group criteria consisting of Team "Sales" and Country "Sweden." To be enrolled in the course, a Learner must now both be part of Team "Sales" and have the Country set to "Sweden."

To create a group criteria, click to add a user attribute from the left side menu, then drag and drop the user attribute over the other attribute that should also be in the group.

You can add multiple different criteria and combine both single criteria and group criteria to enroll Learners in your course. Each user attribute you add is by default separated with a space to clarify that they are separate criteria. When you create a group, there is no space between the user attributes to emphasize that this is a group criteria.

In this example, we have a group criteria and a single criteria. The Learners that will be enrolled in this course will have to meet one of the two criteria, which is either:

OR

💡 Rule of thumb: space in between user attributes means that it's a separate criteria.

As we introduce Smart Enrollment, you will no longer be able to add Learners to a course by adding a tag to the course in your Course Settings. This means that there are no specific relation between a course and a tag other than using tags to segment your courses. To add Learners to the course with a tag you now simply add this tag to the Smart Enrollment feature.

To visualize this, we've added tabs to the Tag menu so that you can easily see where your tags are being used. If you've added the tag as Smart Enrollment criteria to a course, then the course will be shown in the Smart Enrollment tab.

ℹ️ Tags already added to your courses in previous versions will automatically be added as Smart Enrollment criteria for the course when we update to v18. This means you don't have to take any actions to your existing courses with tags.

As part of Learnster v14, we introduced the Compliance feature, and now we're adding additional functionality to unleash its full potential! 💪

Until now, Compliance Courses have required a compliance period that decides how long a Learner will be compliant after completing the course. With the One-time Certification option, you can choose to not set a compliance period. This will allow your Learners to complete the compliance course and stay compliant indefinitely (or until they are actively marked as not compliant).

💡 One-Time Certification is a great feature for courses that can be considered extra important and/or require a follow-up from admins or managers.

With a set compliance period, your Learners will have a natural deadline as the compliance period runs out. However, for the compliance period to start, you do need to complete the course a first time. For that reason, we've added a first time completion deadline to make sure your Learners get compliant right from the start.

Toggle the switch to enable the first time completion deadline and configure your deadline and reminders. You can add several reminders and decide how many days before/after deadline they should be sent out. It's also possible to choose to whom the reminder should be sent. You might want a first reminder for the Learner, but a second reminder might also be sent to the Learner's Team Manager. If so, just add another reminder and choose "Team Manager" in the dropdown menu.

ℹ️ With the addition of First Time Completion Deadline, there's no need for a regular course deadline for compliance courses. Hence, if Compliance is enabled, the regular course deadline will be disabled.

In today's role permissions, you can give Team Managers and Direct Managers the ability to assign any active course to their Team Members. In v18, we've added a more detailed option as to what courses a Manager should be able to assign to their Team Members.

To find this setting, go to Role Permissions and choose Team Manager/Direct Manager and find the permission called "Course Assignment." Toggle the switch to enable Managers to assign courses to their Team Members. Then choose from the following options to decide what courses they should be able to assign:

As a result of increasing our base of international Learners, we keep adding support for more languages in Learnster U. In v18, we are adding language support for Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian.

Feel free to check out the release notes for our previous versions here! 🤩