#1 2008-12-22 15:10:13

**_dwatkins_**

Curriculum versus Course

Hi all...

I'm trying to deliver training content to my company. I want to create a curriculum and add several courses to it. However, we don't have all the material ready at this point. We will still need to add several courses down the line. How will this affect the reporting features? Also, though the enrollee list will be the same for each course, we will be adding to it as new users join the company. What impact, if any, does that have on reporting? And...if employees leave, is it possible to remove them as enrollees so they no longer appear in the reporting?

Fundamentally, I'm wondering if it is better to create separate curricula or if the courses will work fine? Also, what happens to reporting if I need to update a course?

Thank you in advance to any insight you can share.

-David

**_jameslloyd_**

Re: Curriculum versus Course

Hi David, these are great questions.

My understanding from Adobe is that their 'curriculum' was designed to be fully populated before beign exposed to learners.  So when you add content or a course to an existing curriculum you will always receive a warning from the system.  That said, we do it all the time.  We have weeklong classroom trainings and we perform assessments in Connect Training, but the subject experts never get the questions to us in time so we end up posting new test throughout the session.  I can't say that I've ever experienced a problem, but I also understand that it is fragile - should we find a mistake in a test, we just tell the learners rather than trying to update the course & curriculum - I do believe doing so would break the curriculum reporting.

About adding learners to longer term curriculum, again, I've not had a problem with this.  Most of our curriculums are 3 months long, but we have a couple that have been around for 3 years.  New users added have been fine (via groups - I do all enrollment using groups).  I do not remove users from the system, but put them into a 'withdrawn' group  (for us, this is so that we can restore their training history if they return to the program).

I've not noticed problems with reporting but as you say, withdrawn users will still appear in reports.  If there is a business reason for them not to appear, then perhaps the new reporting tools will help filter - especially if you consider a group to identify withdrawn users.  I've only had access to the reporting tools since it was added late to hosted accounts so I'm not very familiar with it's capabilities.  For example, I do not know if a training record was made before the user was in a group, whether it is possible to filter that record on a more recently created group!

I really hope as this product matures and as the connectusers.com resource grows we can find places to discuss course & curriculum management because there is still a lot that is like smoke and mirrors to me!

**_mark2741_**

Re: Curriculum versus Course

"I really hope as this product matures and as the connectusers.com resource grows we can find places to discuss course & curriculum management because there is still a lot that is like smoke and mirrors to me!"

Well said james - I agree. I really like Connect for synchronous meetings/webcasts/training, but for asynchronous I still don't grasp the best way (is there a good way available in this product?) to structure training. Long ppt's don't work well in Connect - I find that at least once during a one-hour self-paced course a glitch occurs, whether it be audio getting cut-off, or navigation issues. And trying to develop anything more than a short presentation in ppt is just plain disorienting to me. Forget branching and the like....

But I also hate the idea of breaking everything up into short topics that then must be launched individually in a pop-up window. I realize that that is how most LMS's do it (if not all of them), where content is launched in a _blank window, but other LMS's provide the ability to do multi-content objects (ie, multi SCORM objects, not this AICC stuff that no one seems to know about and the decrepit AICC website is useless), so that we could use lots of low-cost or free tools that can put together some really nice courseware (eXe, Microsoft LCDS, etc.).

My company has had Connect since v4 and I've been waiting for it to get better, but I'm afraid it's not going to ever fit my needs.

**_dwatkins_**

Re: Curriculum versus Course

Thank you for your helpful response. For our temporary solution, I've decided to put courses within separate folders instead of creating a more comprehensive curriculum. These specific courses are not mandatory and have no expiration date. But we do want to track viewership.

Thank you again.