As we know from Refreshing courses we can refresh a course for an individual or we can make lots of people do a course again.

This is great but what are my options with regards to automating this process?

I’m so glad you asked, read on.

You have two options when it comes to automation:

• Make an individual do their course again after a set period of time (The Periodic Refresh)
• Make everyone do this course again on the same date every year (The Annual Refresh)

The second option is less popular than the first, particularly if you have to manage lots of teams to get their learning done on time but it might prove useful once everyone gets used to the regularity of it.

Whichever option you choose, you do it from Courses … Overview:

Simply search for the course that you want to configure and press Refresh Schedule:

Pick New to create a new “rule”:

1. The Periodic Refresh

To set up a rule that says “refresh anyone who completed their learning a year ago”, simply enter 356 into the “Refresh after (days):” field, give it an “order” number (“1” will do just fine, all of the rules will sort themselves out as you go) and press Save:

That’s it!

The order number comes into play when you set up more complex refresh rules for the same course so let’s keep it simple for now.

So we now have a simple rule that will refresh anyone who completed their learning a year ago, so we’re going to make them do it again:

Pick Download refresh schedule to see who this is going to affect anytime soon; it’ll download a file (depending on which browser you use):

Open up the file and it’ll tell you who’s going to be refreshed and when.

When you open the file you’ll see the refresh date for each person:

Ideally they’ll all be in the future! This means that your learning plan, which aligns with your business goals; that you’ve communicated to all of your teams, and your managers are managing, is working.

If you see a date that is in the past, however, this means that the course has already been refreshed and that these people are now overdue and your team may not be compliant.

2. The Annual Refresh

If you need to create a rule that will refresh everyone on the 1^st of November every year then you just need to use the calendar picker to select your date:

… and set your “order” to be 1

Whilst it will show a date in the current year, it is actually clever enough to do this on the same date every year.

To refine your rules further, simply use the drop down menus to tighten your rules:

So the above rule will read as “Refresh this course if it was completed a year ago and you are an Administrator with a Manager dashboard and a learning profile called DC Management”.

For Advanced Administrators

Consider the scenario where your business relies on seasonal workers who may be set as active and inactive throughout the year. They still need to be trained; however, you might consider someone who left your business but came back within a short period of time to still be compliant. You might also want “anyone who left to have their courses refreshed after a set period of time, say 3 months, so that when they return the first thing they need to do is their learning”. In which case, we have a solution for you.

The first thing to point out is that this solution works if the learner returns with the same username that they had previously. If you give them a new username then none of the courses that they have to do will ever have been done before.

Let’s go back to our original scenario in terms of how much time should elapse before the refresh comes in to play. The actual setting needs to be in days; 3 months equates to 92 days to enter “92” as the Refresh after value:

Make sure you tick the Include inactive users box because the normal refresh rules only apply to active learners.

Finally we need to tell the automated refresh code to be a bit more specific and this is why this solution might not be for the faint-hearted (just contact us and we’ll help you!). The somewhat unfriendly looking code highlighted is telling the refresh code to “only refresh people after 92 days has elapsed since the leaving date that we have in our database”. The “Custom SQL” feature is a really handy way for us to refine how we refresh people’s learning so if you’ve got some “weird and wonderful” rules that you’d like to apply then get in touch and we’ll see how we can help you.