Re-Enrolling into an Annual course
Is there a way to re-enroll someone into a course that they have already completed - without removing the existing completion record:
Example: We have Annual Compliance courses that are issued once a year to every employee (new and existing). The easiest solution is to just re-enroll using CSV and remove completion records, however, we don't want to do this and retain the previous years records.
Once possible workaround is to create a duplicate course (named it with the current year enrollment) and then enroll learners. But this method can become a bit of a nightmare with multiple duplicated courses.
Has anyone encountered this - is this possible?
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Hi Eric, I'm commenting to follow this topic as we have the same issue. Our solution is the same as yours-- to duplicate the course and add the year for clarity. And, our rational is the same, we need the previous completion record for federal regulation compliance audits. Hoping to hear of a better solution. Thank you for posting.
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Hi Eric and Katie, are you familiar with the Expires function in Course Settings? The purpose of this is to auto-reenroll people who have completed courses that need to be retaken (for compliance or other reasons) on a periodic basis. You can set the number of days until they need to be re-enrolled (like 365, for annual) and then you can count on Bridge re-enrolling the learners and tracking completion for each year.
Hope this helps.
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Thanks Ryan! Just to confirm, if the Expire setting is used and re-enrollment occurs, are the previous completion records retained? I.e am I able to report on the learner that the course was completed in the previous year(s)? or does Bridge wipe the slate clean when it re-enrolls?
Eric
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Thank you, Ryan. When I have tested it, the previous record is not visible. Also, my concern with using the expires option is that if a learner never takes it, they would never be re-assigned the course. For our compliance reporting it is important to have clear records of all completions and assignment. Ideally the report would show all completions and any incomplete assignments for a learner. UPDATE: Recently additional options have been added to the expiration feature to allow an admin to select that it expires from the date of assignment rather than completion. This helps me overcome some of my concerns and when I tested the original record is now retained.
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Ryan Houmand Still looking for a solution here. I am about to re-issue an annual course to all employees - we are not "on schedule". I have over 1,600 employees to enroll - most are re-enrollments as they've completed the same course at some point last year. What is the best way to re-enroll these learners?
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Hi Eric...I have encountered this issue with other LMSs as well. When it comes to compliance-type courses, I have resigned to saving previous year's completion records, duplicating course, archiving old course, and renaming new course with new year. This is far from ideal, but the juice is worth the squeeze considering the importance of accurate records. For me, there's too much uncertainty in the other options. In theory, the auto-enroll/expiry options are nice and a feature of virtually every LMS; in practice they are complicated and come with unexpected exceptions that create a bit of a mess. If you are in a time-crunch, go with safe as I've learned the hard way about mistakes when in a rush. There are likely ways to make these things work, but I haven't figured it out which might tell you something about my skills too:) Good luck!
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Thanks Chris. Yes, the more people I talk to about this, it always ends up with the same "workaround"; duplicating course, renaming it with the Year and archiving/saving previous course records. This has always been my "plan B" but was hoping for a better, easier solution. Guess not... it's now my Plan A.
Just hoped Bridge would make it easier to just set a "bulk re-enroll" feature - and yes, I've submitted this as a feature request.
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I understand it is frustrating because of the way these features are touted. My assumption is that in the initial build for most/all of these systems included technical requirement to reassign courses on a set-time basis. Unfortunately, the technical requirement didn't include the concept of compliance courses, so that was never a consideration. Been a lot of development around versioning in the LMS space, so maybe someday an auto-enroll feature can automatically create a new version of a course and assign that one keeping the previous records intact.
Not sure if this helps, but I've started to make Smart Groups for specific compliance courses using a "One Time" and a "New Employee" with the year. Example: 2023 One Time for All - Annual Compliance Training Smart Group; then assign the course to the Smart Group. I set the rules for this group to include all employees prior to the date of assignment. This prevents new employees from getting it. If new employees also need to show completion during on-boarding process, I use the same concept with a duplicated course. This does create a 2nd record, but allows me to show that we assigned to all employees on a certain date and prove that we also have new employees take it.
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Hi, I am doing something very similar with Smart Groups - i have an 'Annual Compliance' Group, which is essentially an All Learners group with some exceptions we have in place. I use this to enroll learners into a Compliance course. Then I have an 'New Hire Compliance' group that captures anyone hired after a specific date and assigns courses. When I pull my reports, I include the two groups in the filters and from there I am able to see who was enrolled through the Annual Compliance group and who was a new hire enrollment.
Thanks for the conversation around this - it helps me work out scenarios. If anyone has other ideas or a different way of achieving this, I'd be happy to hear about them.
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These are all great tips! We do have an article here that outlines some very similar best practices for compliance training setup. Note that we will also be making some improvements to smart groups very soon that will allow for "and/or" logic.
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