So, you’ve just started a new job with a company that’s a big fan of e-learning. So much so that they’ve created a huge library of content for the team to upskill themselves!

As the Platform Administrator, it’s a good idea to group courses together (we call them course types) so that your teams can work through them quickly and in order of importance.

You might be wondering why you should be grouping courses in the first place? Well, there are a few reasons for this! The first is that it will make the job for you and your learners so much easier and hassle-free. You don’t want learners spending time trying to figure out where to find their courses and which they should be doing first. Because they will probably come to you with these questions, and you might end up spending quite a lot of time pointing learners in the right direction when you could be doing something more useful!

Another reason for grouping your courses is that it makes analysing the data and compiling reports much easier and quicker. In a data-driven world, this is key! Having your courses in groups will help you measure their effectiveness against your business goals.

For example, one of your course types may be ‘week one learning’. Now, you’ll probably want to know things such as how many of your learners are completing these courses or how many people haven’t even started them yet. Imagine if your new learners could quickly get to their urgent week one courses to complete them and that you could see your week one stats in one easy-to-pick filter option. Having a week one induction course type already in place will make this easy.

From your dashboard select Courses followed by Group and Sort Courses:

Let’s look at course types and how exactly it all works. Below is an example of course types in action:

Here you will find all the course types that have previously been created:

This list is to make it easier for you to manage course types, so use course type names that make sense to you based on what courses you’re going to assign to them.

The choice of course types is completely up to you, and every course on the platform should ideally belong to a course type. Any courses that aren’t assigned to a course type will appear on your learning roadmap in a section called ‘Courses with no course type’. And it’s also worth mentioning that each course can only be assigned to one course type at a time.

Let’s work through a complete example to illustrate just how course types work.

First, let’s Create a new course type:

To create one quickly, you’ll need to give it a name, a description, make it active, define the sequence number it should appear in, and press Save:

(If you don’t complete everything that’s required then it will tell you!)

Click the breadcrumb trail to go back to the main list:

So, now we have a new course type (which we want to appear at the top of the list):

It will only appear, of course, if it has some courses assigned to it. To do this use the cog symbol as shown when you go back to Group and Sort Courses.

Pick your course title from the dropdown menu:

And don’t forget to press Save:

To edit a course type, click on the course type name.

Here’s where you can change the order a course appears within a course type, just pick a grey arrow and move your course up or down:

Pick Edit:

To change an icon press Upload image:

You can use a png, jpg or svg image format – if the image isn’t bigger than 50 pixels by 50 pixels:

When you’re happy, press Submit:

Remember, the Name is to help you manage all your course types, the Description is what will appear on the learning roadmap so use it to engage your learners to open it up and complete all the courses in it!

• We’ve thrown a lot of information your way, so let’s recap:
• Course types are groups of courses that make it quicker and easier for your teams to complete their learning.
• Every course should ideally belong to a course type and can only belong to one at a time.
• When creating a new course type, you’ll need a name, description, and the order in which you want it to appear on the dropdown menu.
• Add an icon that is 50 pixels by 50 pixels.

… and when you’re all done, select Submit.

When we were creating or editing a course type, you may have noticed that there is an active box. Active course types appear in your reporting filters e.g. in Your team’s performance immediately. If you set a course type as inactive then you won’t be able to filter on it but it will still appear on the Learner Roadmap with its associated courses.

And to conclude this guide, let’s delete our new course type! It’s as easy as pressing the delete (bin) icon:

Press OK in the pop-up to delete, or Cancel if you have second thoughts:

You can’t delete a course type that has courses assigned to it. When you’ve removed your courses from a course type, by using Group and Sort Courses followed by the cog icon to edit each course and pick a different course type, you can then delete any course type with an active bin icon (not the grey ones).

The next suggested guide is Grouping courses into learning profiles

You might also find this useful: Courses available on my platform