As we evolve our learning programs, we need to ability to add curriculums within curriculums. This would allow us to give learners a choice in what they need to take for a single requirement. So for example, we have sales reps who need annual continuing education. We would like to provide them with several curriculums covering multiple relevant topics and they would need to complete two of them to receive credit for their continued ed.
We have ILTs that also include course objects, requiring us to create a Curriculum for each of those instead of a single blended course. But if we have multiple blended courses to include in a curriculum, it is impossible to create a curriculum containing the other curriculums. Having a blended course option or allowing curriculums within curriculums would allow us to create curriculums that include blended courses.
I'll be suggesting an alterative "idea". I appreciate the complexity this might have with the things you've described Paul. Something NEEDS to be done though to have more levels of grouping for designing longer term learning paths. Lacking this feature for how we are building our strategy is becoming a vendor requirement.
This is a good idea but the implications of it are too complex for us to tackle with all of the other initiatives we need to dedicate resources to. It may be something we eventually do, but the overwhelming majority of Courses hosted in Absorb have a single learning object, and I am not sure there is a data point I could use to measure what the uptake on this feature would be to prove the ROI of building something so complicated. In conjunction with some of the other suggested features, like retroactive date, enrollment, and completion requirement effects, there is little chance we'd be able to build this is in a way that satisfied all clients who want to use it.
I have been exploring solutions and came across a possible resolution with some support from the product team. When you add a course, there are options for "Use Existing" and "Content Libraries". Within these, you can select the content from another course to utilize. For us, if the user completion of this course package applied to the other shared courses, we could create the nested curriculum within the chapter of the course and then add those courses to the primary curriculum. If someone needed the course to be retaken in the curriculum, they could just re-upload the SCORM as they would normally do in a course.
I have two curricula where this would solve a multitude of problems. The first is our manager training program. We currently make do with the use of chapters but would benefit more if each chapter was its own curriculum. Each chapter consists of a combination of online courses and ILCs.
The second is our sales advanced certification program. It includes 12 “courses” – 6 required courses and 6 electives from which the learner chooses 3. Each “course” consists of an online pre-work course, an ILC, and an online post work course. Each ILC is offered twice a year. The prework opens 2 weeks prior and must be completed to attend the ILC. Postwork opens when ILC is marked complete and is open for 2 weeks after the ILC. Each course has a tenure requirement ranging from 6 months to 18 months with the company. We are currently working on our third iteration of this curriculum utilizing the system as it is now. Enabling each "course" to be its own curriculum within the larger curriculum would make this a great deal easier!
(I say "course" to mean a group of courses - online pre-work, ILC, online post-work.)
Oh I just had this come up. We have a PROGRAM with 2 sets of curriculum (4 ILCs in each). Only when our superiors complete both sets of curriculum the program is considered complete.