Introduction
In the LMS Configuration section of course catalogs, course catalog administrators can configure the following settings for the course catalog in question:
- Course Rating
- Course Sessions Display
- Enrollment Flows
- SharePoint Site Theme Settings (deprecated soon)
- Regional Settings
- Training Banner Image
- xAPI Configuration
The article describes these configurations in details.
Where to find the LMS Configuration section of a course catalog?
In the LMS365 Admin Center of the course catalog, go to Catalog Settings > LMS Configuration. From the LMS Configuration panel, select and configure the settings.
Course Rating
The Course Rating setting allows you to enable or disable the rating function for courses and training plans in the course catalog.
If this option is enabled, learners will be able to rate courses and training plans in LMS365 using a star rating system.
To enable rating of courses:
1) Select Course Rating
2) From the Course Rating panel, enable Show Rating by dragging the toggle to On.
3) Save to save the changes. Cancel to cancel the action and close the panel.
NOTE
If the Show Rating option is disabled, learners will not be able to rate course or training plan. In this situation, the option of sorting by Highest Ranked Courses will not be available from the course catalog's overview of training, and the Manage Rating option will be hidden from the Course Management and Training Plan Management panels.
Course Sessions Display
Under Course Sessions Display, you define the number of course sessions in the Instructor-Led trainings that will be shown on the course home page when the course is previewed from the course catalog.
To configure this number, under Maximum number of sessions, type in the number of course sessions out of the total number of planned sessions that will be displayed on the course home page and on the course card's session display when the course is previewed from the course catalog. The default value is 1.
If the number of sessions in a course exceeds the value in Maximum number of sessions, more course sessions will be visible for users when they select the drop-down button.
For example, there are four planned sessions in the course, and you have configured two in Maximum number of sessions. Then, two sessions will be visible to learners on the course home page. The remaining course sessions can be seen by selecting Show more sessions in the Information section on the course home page.
Enrollment Flows
This configuration allows you to choose which enrollment flows that will be available for courses and training plans in the course catalog.
To configure available enrollment flows, you enable/disable the different types of flows by dragging On/Off. By default, all enrollment flows are enabled, except External Approval (Webhook):
- Automatic Approval – Enrollment will be done automatically by the system when a learner enrolls in the course.
- Line Manager Approval – The enrollment request need to be approved or rejected by the line manager of the learner (users assigned as line manager in Azure AD).
- Administrator Approval – The enrollment request need to be approved or rejected by the course administrator or course catalog administrator.
- External Approval (Webhook) – The enrollment flow makes it possible to create a custom approval flow (for example, in Microsoft Power Automate) using the ‘EnrollmentApprovalRequest’ webhook event. For more information, please see this article on LMS365 webhooks.
Enable the enrollment flows you would like to be available in the course catalog. Select Save to save the settings. Select Cancel to cancel the process and close the Enrollment Flows panel.
Regional Settings
Under Regional Settings, you can configure time zone, locale, and the first day of the week for the course catalog in question. By default, courses and training plans inherit regional settings from the course catalog.
- Time Zone - Defines the time used by the course notifications and reports of the course catalog.
- Locale - Determines the format of numbers, date, and time, and the language the course catalog uses in notifications and reports. The selected locale automatically sets the First Day of the Week.
- First Day of the Week - Sets the first day of the week for all training created within the course catalog. The First Day of the Week is used by:
- The Leaderboard web part to define the week while sorting the learners by This Week.
- The My Assignments web part to define the week.
This Regional Settings you configure in this section will be the default settings of all courses and training plans in the course catalog that can be manually customized for each course or training plan in the training Settings > Regional Settings while creating/editing it.
SharePoint Site Theme Settings (deprecated soon)
As SharePoint color themes are applied per subsite, you can apply a predefined SharePoint color theme to all subsite-based courses and training plans within a course catalog.
For all courses and training plans in LMS365, created before the LMS365 January 2022 release, a SharePoint subsite was also created. SharePoint's default behavior is to apply a random color theme to the subsite of a newly created course or training plan. So if no color theme was set for the SharePoint site of courses and training plans, these subsites will have a different and random color themes. Action buttons, links, and the like will, therefore, be of different colors on different training home pages in the same course catalog.
The SharePoint Site Theme Settings option allows course catalog admins to control the color theme of course and training plan subsites by selecting a standard SharePoint color theme to be applied to the SharePoint subsite of courses and training plans within the course catalog.
Starting from January 2022 release, courses and training plans will be created as pages placed at the root of the SharePoint course catalog site. These pages will inherit the color theme of the course catalog SharePoint site.
In the future, we will offer a way to migrate subsite-based courses and training plans, and this feature will be deprecated.
For more information please refer to the following article.
The confirmation message will notify that you are going to apply the selected color theme to all course and training plan subsites within the catalog. You will not be able to revert the action back to the current themes for existing training subsites, but should you want to select another color theme at a later time, you can repeat this action.
To proceed with action, select Apply. To cancel the action, select Cancel.
NOTE
- The color theme of the course catalog's site itself is not influenced, since this is set directly in SharePoint.
- It's possible to set color themes for subsites of the course catalog directly from the SharePoint site. For more information, navigate to this article.
Training Banner Image
The Training Banner Image option enables course catalog admins to upload a library of banner images on course catalog-level and to select an image among these to be the default banner image for courses and training plans created in the course catalog.
NOTE
For courses and training plans created before the LMS365 January 2022 release, the banner image is managed from the SharePoint site of the course or training plan in question. Therefore, images uploaded via the LMS365 Training Banner Image setting can't be used in these courses.
To add images to the selection, upload new images from your device by selecting Upload.
We recommend to use images of a 1236 pixels' width and in the following formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, JPEG.
All uploaded images will become part of the banner image library shared within the whole course catalog and can be used by all course catalog and course admins as banner images of courses and training plans.
All images that are uploaded via the Banner Image setting in the Create/Edit Training (Course)/Training Plan panel also automatically become part of the banner images library - regardless if these images are used in any training or just uploaded.
To add an image as the default banner image, select the image from the selection. The selected image will be highlighted with a blue frame. After you Save the changes, the image will be marked with a blue checkmark and featured at the top of the panel to show that it's the default banner image for all new training of this course catalog.
If you don't want a default banner image, you can unselect the image that is currently the default banner image and save these changes. In this case, new courses and training plans will not have a banner image unless it's added by the admin.
To delete images from the library of banner images, select the images and press Delete. This action can't be undone. Images that are in use as a banner image in any course or training plan can't be deleted. If you try to delete such an image, a message will warn you: 'You can't delete this image. It is in use'.
xAPI Configuration
Enabling xAPI Configuration will make LMS365 send statements on learners' training start and completion to an external Learning Record Store (LRS) through xAPI signals. Signals will be sent from LMS365 to the connected LRS when learners start and complete any kind of training in the current course catalog, except for imported external training.
By default, the xAPI Configuration option is disabled.
To allow tracking of learners’ activities in a 3rd party Learning Record Store (LRS) via xAPI, follow the steps below:
1) On the xAPI panel, enable Send xAPI signals to external LRS by dragging the toggle to On.
2) Fill out the fields:
- In the LRS Endpoint field, enter the full URL of the LRS endpoint. You can get it from the LRS you want to send learners' statements to.
- In the Username field, enter the username (the same you use in your LRS) or access key for authentication into LRS.
- In the Password field, enter the password (the same you use in your LRS) or secret key for authentication into LRS.
3) Select Save to complete the configuration. A test connection will be executed with the provided credentials.
Or select Cancel to cancel the action and close the xAPI Configuration panel.
If you decide to disable the configuration after the entered data have been saved, drag the toggle to Off. Data that was previously saved will be preserved.
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