We are delighted to announce that from the April 2022 release of LMS365, we will introduce updates that will improve the user experience of creating and managing training in LMS365.
The course types for classroom and webinar courses will now be combined into one course type for instructor-led training; and, going forward, courses and training plans will be managed from the same place in course catalogs. This will simplify the interface of creating and managing training in LMS365 and enable learners to easily distinguish between self-paced e-learning and instructor-led training in a course catalog.
In this article, we will cover the details of these changes and what they mean to you as a customer.
In this article:
- Combination of the course types, Classroom & Blended Training and Webinar
- Courses and training plans will now be managed from the same place
- How will the changes affect the user interface for learners and admins?
- How will the changes affect LMS365 APIs?
- How will the changes affect notifications?
- What happens to all current session-based courses?
- What are the future plans?
Combination of the course types, Classroom & Blended Training and Webinar
For a while, the LMS365 product has supported courses that include classroom as well as webinar sessions.
In this way, course creators can today select the course type currently called Classroom & Blended Training to create either a course that includes only virtual sessions, a course that solely consists of sessions in a physical classroom, or a course that offers a combination of online and classroom sessions.
This means that all types of instructor-led training—be it on-site, in an online meeting, or a combination of the two—is possible with this one course type. To make the LMS365 user interface simpler and more intuitive to manage, going forward, we will, therefore, reduce the two current course types for session-based courses to this one course type.
As a consequence of this, after this change, it will not be possible to create courses of the course type Webinar. Also, we will rename the remaining course type for session-based training, Classroom & Blended Training to Instructor-Led Training, intuitively indicating to admins and learners alike that this course type covers all types of training that includes sessions facilitated by an instructor.
This particular change is part of a wave of improvements to session-based courses that will be introduced in the coming months.
Courses and training plans will now be managed from the same place
Today, courses and training plans are created and managed from separate pages in course catalogs.
To provide admins a clear overview of all training in a course catalog and further simplify the process of creating and managing training, we will now combine these pages into a single interface, called Training Management.
Going forward all training in a course catalog will be created and managed from this page.
All current courses and training plans will be listed on this page to provide a complete view of all training in a course catalog.
How will the change affect the user interface for learners and admins?
As there will now be one interface to create and manage all training in a course catalog and as we will reduce the two current course types for session-based training to the course type currently called Classroom & Blended Training, this will create a simpler user interface for both admins and learners.
When creating training, admins will now go to this one interface and, from here, choose whether to create a session-based course, an e-learning course, or a training plan.
Filters in the LMS365 Admin Center will be updated with this change to enable admins to filter on courses of the type e-Learning and Instructor-Led Training and to easily sort the training to get an overview of, respectively, training plans, courses, or courses of a specific course type in the course catalog.
Learners will experience the change on the course catalog page where they will now see the new name of the course type for session-based training, Instructor-Led Training, on training cards, and in filters.
New filters will be introduced to allow learners to sort between courses with sessions that are held on-site and in a virtual classroom.
How will the change affect LMS365 APIs and custom solutions?
No breaking changes will be introduced to LMS365 APIs with the update.
Custom solutions created with LMS365 APIs will continue to work as they currently do, and it will still be possible to create courses of both the type Webinar and Classroom & Blended Training with LMS365 APIs. However, in the LMS365 user interface, these courses will all be shown as Instructor-Led Training.
For a period after the update, it will be necessary to both query courses of the type classroom & Blended Training and Webinar to query all courses of the type Instructor-Led Training.
There will be no changes to training plan APIs.
How will the change affect notifications?
For courses created before the April 2022 release of the course type Webinar, notifications for the Webinar course type will remain for a grace period of at least three months and will still be sent after the release.
For courses of the course type Classroom & Blended Training created before the April 2022 release and for all session-based courses created after the April 2022 release, the current notifications for Classroom & Blended Training will be sent. However, the course type seen in the name of these notification templates will change into Instructor-Led Training and some variables will change. Former variables will continue to work for a grace period, also, of three months after the April 2022 release.
A notable change is that after the grace period, notification templates for the course type Webinar will be removed. Therefore, with the April 2022 release, please review the notification templates for the course type Instructor-Led Training (currently called Classroom & Blended Training) and ensure they will work in your organization for all types of session-based training (be it virtual, on-site, or a combination of these options).
There will be no changes to training plan notifications.
NOTE
If you have customized fields of a notification template, these fields of the template will not be updated with new LMS365 releases. Therefore, depending on the fields you have customized, you might not see all changes that will be introduced to default notification templates. Be sure to check your notification templates to understand what customizations you have today and how they can impact this update. Also, after the April 2022 release, ensure you use the new variables for customized templates as the former variables will not be working after the grace period.
What happens to all current session-based courses?
All courses, that have been created before the April 2022 release of either the course type Classroom & Blended Training or Webinar, will be marked as Instructor-Led Training instead. Besides this renaming, no changes will happen to the course itself.
This also means that the session-based courses you build now will be fully functional after the release of this change.
What are the future plans?
As mentioned, notification templates for the course type Webinar will be removed after a grace period of three months after the April 2022 release. Instead, notification templates for courses of the course type Instructor-Led Training will be used for all session-based courses.
Going forward, we will create a solution to query all session-based courses via API by only querying one course type.
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