Quick Start for Instructors - Courses

You can use InstructorSite to create and manage instructor-led and eLearning/video courses. This Quick Start Guide focuses on creating and managing courses.

Courses

InstructorSite supports 3 types of courses.  Use the ‘instructor-led’ course-type for live webinars and classroom training events occurring at a specific time and location.  Use the ‘eLearning/video’ course-type for pre-recorded training viewed at any time.  Use the ‘both’ course-type for courses that can be completed by attending a training event or viewing a pre-recorded video.

You can add an instructor-led course to the calendar by creating an event for it. You can use Plans to group courses for learners to complete. All courses are listed in the Catalog.

Tip: For more info about instructor-led training, see Quick Start Guide for Managing Events

Best Practice: Map out your course prefixes and numbers before creating them in InstructorSite.

Creating Courses

You can create a new course by clicking the + Button in the Navigation Bar and choosing Course option from the Navigation Bar.

Required Fields

When creating a new course you are required to set a course prefix, number, title, and duration. You can also set advanced options such as suggested or required prerequisite courses, visibility in LearningSite, visibility by audience, enable ratings, make exempt from manager approval, and designate as an assessment. You can also control who has the ability to edit a course by designating a specific Department such as HR, Professional Development or IT.

Best Practice: Courses should not be deleted as this could delete learning history such as learning plan completions and credits earned. Instead use the ‘Visible in LearningSite’ checkbox under advanced settings to hide courses that are no longer relevant.

Ratings

Ratings are an important tool that allows learners to share their thoughts about courses and/or instructors while promoting the learning to others. LearningSite uses the rating system to advertise the best rated videos and courses. Ratings are also visible when viewing courses but don’t worry, ratings go through an approval process to ensure that the comments are appropriate.  For some courses you might not want Ratings, so keep in mind that they can be disabled for specific courses.

Resources

Resources are document links, PDF files, and eLearning/video zip files. You can add a link to the Quick Reference Card for each instructor-led course. When creating an eLearning course you must upload a SCORM package containing the video. For eLearning videos, InstructorSite tracks if it was started, completed successfully or completed unsuccessfully. For resources such as PDFs, links or videos it also tracks the number or views.

Best Practice: Test each eLearning package for 3 things; launching it and then closing it without finishing should return “Incomplete”, launching a second time should continue from where you left off, finishing should return “Completed Successfully” or “Completed Unsuccessfully.”

Best Practice: Ensure linked resources are accessible by all LearningSite users, even those who are connecting from away from the office or mobile devices where links to intranet pages and document management systems might not be accessible.

Grants

There’s a shortcut for giving someone credit for completing a course that they didn’t attend or view – we call this a grant.  Generally speaking you should avoid creating grants, but from time to time it’s a handy shortcut.  For example, if a prerequisite is preventing a user accessing a course, you could give them a grant for the prerequisite course.  Note that this will appear on their record as a course completion and you may not want that.

Audiences

An Audience is a group of learners.  When you create a course you can limit its exposure to specific audiences. For example, you may want managers and only managers to be able to see a compliance course that is required for managers.

Departments

By default, if you can create or edit a course, you can create and edit every course.  When multiple departments are using InstructorSite this may be undesirable.  You can assign departments to a course to prevent InstructorSite users outside of those departments from being able to make changes to it.

Tags

You can improve the end user’s experience by tagging courses. Let’s say you have several courses and videos about Document Comparison but none of them include terms such as Redline or Blackline. You can add these terms as Tags to your Document Comparison courses to help learners who might search by these terms.

Plans

You can use plans as an easy way to track the completion of one or more courses. For example, there is a compliance course required for group of managers.  You can create a Plan with the course and enroll the learners. Now you can quickly see who has completed or not completed the required course.

Sharing

It’s easy to get links to courses for your emails and your intranet.  InstructorSite’s course profile includes multiple sharing options.  For example, you can share a link to an instructor-led course with learners for viewing the course schedule and registering to attend one of the events.  Or you can share a link to a video in LearningSite.  You can even share a link that automatically starts the video player.  You can also assign a tag to a group of courses and then (using LearningSite) share a link to courses matching that tag.

Reports

Course Attempts Report

The course attempts report itemizes all learning activity.

Course Completions Report

The Course Completions Report lists all courses that have been completed successfully and by whom.