Setting a course's details and timing
Course settings open from the cog inside a course. The first two tabs hold what the course is called and when it exists — the things a learner uses to find it and the dates that decide whether they can.
General
Section titled “General”- Give it a title. This is what people search.
- Choose a level: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced or Expert. It is a filter on the library, not a restriction on who can take it.
- Write a description and, if it helps, learning objectives. Both take basic formatting.
- Choose a category. One per course, and it drives the library’s category filter.
- Name an owner and an instructor. Optional, and worth doing — the library can filter for courses with no instructor.
- Add a thumbnail, and decide whether to add the course title over it.
Duration
Section titled “Duration”Timeline and its unit are both required. Everything else on the tab is optional and most of it is dates.
Learning hours is separate from the timeline. The timeline is how long the course takes; learning hours is what it counts for, and it is what reporting and any connected HR system read.
CPD category decides which category a completion’s learning hours count towards.
The two dates that decide who sees it
Section titled “The two dates that decide who sees it”Go live and Expiry control visibility, not publication. A published course with a go-live date in the future is live in your library and invisible to learners until that moment; past its expiry it disappears from theirs and stays in yours.
Leave go-live blank and it appears the moment you publish. Leave expiry blank and it never goes away.
This is the pair to check when somebody reports that a course they were assigned is not in their list. Assignment and visibility are different things, and a future go-live date satisfies the first while denying the second.
Certificate validity
Section titled “Certificate validity”Certification valid for is a number of months from completion, after which the certificate expires and the course comes round again.
It is worth knowing how this interacts with assignment. Somebody can be assigned the same course from several directions at once — directly, by job title, by a learning path, by a rule — and each can carry its own validity. Learnient does not pick the first or the last:
| Where they disagree | What applies |
|---|---|
| Certificate validity | The longest |
| Due date | The earliest |
So the strictest deadline wins and the most generous validity wins. Neither is an accident: a deadline is a floor and a validity is a ceiling, and each is resolved in the learner’s favour on the axis where being wrong would be unfair.
Course deadline
Section titled “Course deadline”The deadline control sits on this tab, but deadlines have enough rules of their own to be worth reading separately — see Due dates and deadlines.
What happens when you save
Section titled “What happens when you save”Nothing reaches learners until you publish. Saving a published course records a new version and, where your account requires a publish check, sends the change for approval — the course stays live in the meantime.