Learning activities are the different activities that your users can be enrolled to and opened by the learner on the Learning page. Overall there is three default types of learning activities in Activate LMS:
- Document, such as a .html, .pdf or a .doc. Please note that this type has limited tracking for reports (it is only possible to track whether or not the user has opened the document or not).
- Elearning Module, which is a single SCORM package. This type has advanced tracking for reports.
- Course, which is a bunch of related elearning modules or documents. Elearning modules and documents in courses can both be linked (i.e. you need to complete and pass A to start B) or connectionless (i.e. A and B can be started regardless of each other). The individual activities of the course should be created within the course.
The properties of these types can be seen in the next paragraph. In Activate LMS it is possible to create up to 7 different activity types. In the default version, and in most occasions, three is more than enough. The remaining four levels works as containers of the activity type below. So a 4th level activity type, contains a number of level 3 activity types. In a learning environment this could translate to a class, that contains subjects, which contains courses, which lastly consists of documents/elearning modules. The different levels can be called whatever you want them to be called in your system, and they can be localised.
The learning activity types and their properties
Although the learning activities are different the properties are overall the same. The only noteable difference is the options available in Advanced options. These differences will be noted clearly in the paragraph concerning the Advanced options.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
|
Name |
The name of the activity. This will be used in reports and when enrolling users into the activity. |
| Author |
You can use this to specify who the author of the activity is. The author doesn't need to be an registered user. |
| Estimated Duration |
If Estimated Duration is specified, the value is displayed on the Learning Page to give the learner an idea of how long the activity should take. The time should be written as hh:mm,, i.e. 00:15 (15 minutes) or 01:30 (1 hour and 30 minutes). |
| Image |
The image you want to represent the course. The required size of the image depends on the layout, but the default size is 228 x 136. This property only applies for the Visual View layout. |
| Language | The Language dashboard gives an overview of the different language versions your learning activity has. You can upload different language versions of the SCORM package by clicking the New button. Select the appropriate SCORM package and languauge, provide a localized title and description, and click Insert. If no description or title is provided the learning acitivites default name will be displayed. Activate LMS will then provide the language version that matches the learners language preference. Please note that you must provide a SCORM package in the sites default language as it acts as fallback for unsupported languages. |
| Test and debug | If you are enrolled into a SCORM package you can click the Test link in the URL column, and try out the activity for yourself. If you put checkmarks in the debug checkbox before clicking the Test link, you can see the SCORM communication between learning activity and Activate LMS as you navigate through the uploaded SCORM Package. You have the ability to download the SCORM package as a zip file by clicking on the Download link. |
| Organisational unit | Allows you to restrict which organisations have access to the learning activity. |
| Content owner | After a learning activity is uploaded or created only users who are listed as content owners are allowed to edit the learning activity. Note that it is possible to have more than one content owner. In order to be able to be content owner you must have a role which allows you to edit or create learning activities. |
Advanced Options
As mentioned above, there's a few differences in the advanced options regarding the different learning activity types. Headers of the different options will be marked with an astrix (*) if all types has this option or the relevant type name(s) if the options is not relevant for all types.
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| Enrollment defaults (*) | Dashboard concerning the default settings of enrollments. Please note that changing these settings does not change existing enrollments to the selected learning activity. Only new enrollments created after changing the setting are affected. |
| Initially active (*) |
If checked (the default setting), new enrollments will be active. Active means that the user can participate in the learning activity. If unchecked, new enrollments will not be active. The latter can be useful in situation where you want to assign users to a series of learning activities but want to unlock individual modules as the users completes the modules. Unlocking, or rather activating learning activities can be done using Workflow rules. |
| Lock on completion (*) |
If checked (it's unchecked by default), the learning activity will be locked as soon as a user completes it. Locked means that learning activity is not relaunchable after completion. Use this setting to prevent users from answering a learning activity more than once. |
| Activity available (*) | If this is unchecked, users can no longer be enrolled to the activity nor can activity be seen in reports. Can be useful when you still got some fiddling to do but you don't want to make the learning activity accessible just yet. |
| Allow self-registration (*) | This setting is only available if the Activate LMS site is configured to allow users to search the Learning Catalog and self register to Learning Activities. The Learning Catalog is a catalog of all available learning activities in your LMS that will be used in the learner page if your Activate LMS is set up for self registration to learning activities. If this setting is checked, the Learning Activities will be available in the Learning Catalog for users to self-register. |
| Allow user renewal of registration (*) | Normally you can only enroll a user into an activity one time per user, but if you put a check mark here, you can enroll the user into the activity multiple times. The user also has the ability to do so themselves from the certificate they get for the Learning Activity. |
| Activity Count in parent completion (Elearning module) | Uncheck here if you do not want that activity in the selected Learning Activity should affect progress in the parent course's completion. Use this for optional learning activities. |
| Passmark (%) (Elearning module) | This overrides the passmark set in your SCORM package. I.e. you set the passmark to 80 if want the course to have a passed status if the student scores 80% in a Quiz. Corresponds to the Scaled Passing Score in SCORM. It is recommended that you do not set this value unless you are having problems, but rather deal with this when creating or editing your SCORM content tool. |
| Completion Threshold (%) (Elearning module) | This overrides the completion threshold set in your SCORM package. I.e. you set the completion threshold to 80 if you want the course to have a completed status if the student has visited more than 80% of the content. It is recommended that you do not set this value unless you are having problems, but rather deal with this when creating or editing your content in your SCORM content tool. The setting rely on the SCORM value called Progress Measure, which most content tools unfortunately will not set. |
| Encrypt learner response (Elearning module) | - |
| Player window options (Elearning module) |
Player window options is Used to change how the window that displays the learning activity should look like. Please note that this is an optional and rather technical setting. When a course is opened, a JavaScript function is called: window.open(url, winName, features, replace). The values in this field will be injected as "features". An example of acceptable input in this fied could be: scrollbars = no, status = no, toolbar = no, fullscreen = yes. This would result in a window (when opening the selected elearning module) with no scrollbar and toolbar in a fullscreen view. Please refer to this link to get a detailed list of the different values you can insert in this field. |
| Player doctype (Elearning module) |
Expert setting which is used to modify which HTML doctype the SCORM player is running. Change only if there are problems with tracking the learning activity. This is very very rarely needed. |
| CSS class name (*) |
This can be used to attach a CSS class to a learning activity and thereby control how the learning activity is presented on the Learning page. This setting is only usable using the Visual View layout. Please note that this is a rather technical option and requires a bit of tampering and technical knowledge. A selector for the class, with appropriate properties, will need to be present in the stylesheet accessible under Administration > Configuration > Layout > Stylesheets. |
| Attachment (*) |
Specifies a file here which somehow supplements the Learning Activity. A common use of this could be a document in PDF format containing a printable summary of key points of the learning activity. The attachment is displayed as shown on the image below on the Learning Page.
|
| Certification periods (*) |
Normally users are only enrolled in learning content once, but they can of course access the same enrollment many times (if Lock on completion checkbox is unchecked). Each time the user opens a course the LMS stores the results for the session, and displays the best result the learner achieved. By creating an new certification period and enrolling users in them it tells Activate LMS that we are interested in starting from anew, while keeping the previous sessions related to the previous certification period. |
| Attributes (and whether or not to have a certificate for the Elearning Module) (*) |
In this setting you can set whether or not you wish to have certificate linked to this elearning module. This can be done by opening the dropdown menu (define attribute) and select Show certificate. Set the value to True and press the Add button. Finish by pressing Update. |
Enrollments
Allow you to enroll users into the Learning Activity as well as see and edit the status of the individual course assignments (as indicated by the “traffic light” colors). Can be used to find single assignments and view details, etc.
Filters and searching in enrollments
You can search and filter the existing enrollments to this course by setting some criteria for your search. You can set :
- Certification period, which displays enrollments of the selected certification period.
- Only Show Active Enrollments, which, if check shows only active enrollments. If unchecked then archived enrollments are also displayed.
- You can also search by name of the user or specify the search to certain organisational unit(s).
Workflow
The details of the Workflow tab can be seen by following this link.
Archive
Archive can be used to edit the enrollments of the learning activity in batches. You can change the enrollment status of all or organisational units to: Active, Not active yet and Expired. You can also choose to update all child enrollments to the selected status.
Product
In Product it is possible to define multiple products based on an learning activities. You can specify a price and a period in which users purchasing the product can access the learning activities Please note that this is only available to e-commerce enabled instances of Activate LMS.