Shareable links undermine group settings
Hello. To make things easier for our learners, I routinely use the practice of providing shareable links to learners who ask for help navigating to specific courses, and also when advertising specific courses via other internal channels. I'm also in the practice of using Groups to make certain limited audience courses visible only to a subset of learners. For example, Accounting = In Library OR Home Office = Required. This precludes those courses from being visible in the library for anyone not in the named group settings. However, I was surprised to learn this week that it does NOT preclude someone outside a named group from accessing the course. For example, if I provide the shareable link to Person A (a required learner) and that person provides the link to Person B (course not intended to even be found by this person), then Person B can see and take the course. I tested it to see if we turn OFF shared link, will it keep people out who try to access and unfortunately the answer is no. Once they have the link, they can get in. Is there any way around this? In other words, how can I limit visibility to only those learners who should have access?
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Hey, Heidi Clark ! Appreciate your call out on one of the shareable links giving content exposure to those who do not have direct access through the Learner Relevance settings in Bridge in the backend for course management.
While Learner Relevance does create exposure IN Bridge for specific groups, it is not designed to lock visibility for other users who receive the shareable link.
I would advise only using shareable links for those pieces of content that you are comfortable being viewed by all learners and/or make it clear to your learners that the sharing of the link is designed to be used for a specific department or group.
If you're comfortable sharing some more details here on the sensitivity of the content, I may be able to offer some additional suggestions, or please don't hesitate to join our open office hours. If it is sensitive for a select group, I'd advise using categories to manage content and since they are in numerical/alphabetical order for the learner, I'd number those categories to deliver the most priority content first that's not required (but you're hoping they might find beneficial as optional).
If I understood correctly, and if you want to share the link to those, for whom the course is already visible and required, and not share with those who don't need it, I would try this:
How about you masquarade as one of the users who have it in the library, click on the course, and copy the link from the web page? then it would be in the format of something/something/learner/course/222
I think this way it should only be accessible for those who have a permission to view it.
Please Stephanie correct me if I'm wrong?
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