Assign a different author Answered
Our elearning team upload and publish our scorm courses. Unfortunately, this means that they are the author of the course and so they receive author notifications. This not only means that they receive irrelevant notifications, but more importantly the relevant people do not receive the notifications. It hasn't happened yet, but I can also see this being an issue if the author of a course leaves the organisation.
Is it possible to assign authors to a course?
Can and admin masquerade as a user so that they are the author?
Am I missing something obvious?
Thanks
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5 comments
I have had a response from Bridge support as follows
Yes, they can, but, that change has to be done via API calls. For our API documentation please see https://docs.bridgeapp.com/doc/api/html/index.html
Also, yes you can masquerade as another user and upload or publish SCORM content.
Hi Gaye,
Admins can masquerade to create courses as different users. We actually did this early on to create courses as our "training" account. This was before we realized that the end-users don't actually see who the author is. I didn't want them to think that I was a subject-matter expert for all of the compliance training so instead we used the training account. At times, I would forget to masquerade. When I did that, I would then go into the training account and create a copy of the course and archive or delete the old version where I was the author. I would only recommend this if you don't have any completions.
If you have completions, the learners will no longer be able to review the content once it is archived and obviously if the course is deleted. Another word of caution, if you have assigned a recurrence, you will need to remove the recurring assignment before archiving or it will still redeploy on the next assignment date but they can't access the course.
There was a request in the old community for the ability to change authors or have multiple authors for the same course. I vaguely remember it being on the product roadmap quite some time ago, maybe?? I would definitely encourage you to check with your CSM to see if it has been discussed recently.
As for employees leaving the company, we have experienced that too. When a course is authored by an employee who has left, it becomes orphaned. It still works, but it isn't "owned" by anyone. The author information is just blank. The ability to change authors would be really helpful in that situation. We had an intern for a while and he helped us upload more than 1000 SCORM courses when we switched content vendors. Now every one of those has no author.
Hopefully this helps answer your questions.
Best,
Amy
Hi Gaye Proctor,
There is a way to get Bridge Support to change the author for you. We've had issues with authors leaving, changing roles, etc. and the Author Summary going to the wrong person. They will need the course ID and I think they need the user ID that Bridge assigns (both are numbers). You can find this information in the Download All Data data dump. Most of the user reports have the unique ID number that Bridge assigns. The course templates report has the ID number for the courses.
Once you have this info you can put in a support ticket to have Bridge Support update the author for you.
I hope this helps,
Heidi
There is an option to share a course with a collaborator. Does this not accomplish the same thing?
Good question, Mary. I did a little digging and there isn't anything in the guides about how the collaborator functionality actually works. I didn't want to try it on a live course, but I did check it out in our sandbox. That functionality just provides a link to the course. We limit authors to only be able to edit their own courses, so I'm guessing that limitation would propagate through...but I'm not sure. Either way, the admins in Gaye's example would still receive the emails and the collaborators don't actually become tied to the course in any way, so I'm guessing they wouldn't
Basically, I think the link works like the enrollment links you can send as an author. Enrollment links take the learner to the course and allow enrollment, even if the course isn't in the learning library. This seems to take an author to a course, but I'm not sure if it will let them edit at all, again that likely depends on permissions within a specific instance of Bridge.
Kind regards,
Amy
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