Automate LMS processes so you can focus on your workplace learning goals

July 8, 2021 By Moodle

Creating meaningful online learning experiences for your employees that help your company achieve organizational goals requires you to focus on important activities such as identifying skills gaps and learning needs, promoting your learning programs or sourcing the best learning content. 

However, if you undertake onboarding new employees in your LMS, enrolling staff in courses, sending reminders or awarding certifications manually, a big chunk of your time is spent on admin work. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Save time, money, and hassle with automations

Automating your processes means making your goals and software come together to streamline your workflows, and it has three main advantages:

  • It saves you time by reducing manual work… and that translates to cost savings.
  • It allows you to avoid repetitive tasks so you and your team can focus on other activities.
  • Simple errors are eradicated, including avoiding common mishaps such as typos or duplicate entries.

When it comes to workplace learning, there are many processes that you can automate: from course enrollments, certification allocations or security management for different groups, to sharing reports with team leads or sending reminders to employees with pending assessments.

In fact, you can automate and streamline almost any workflow, for example:

Allocating employees to the right training

A global company has a corporate, multi-tenant Learning Management System, divided into separate eLearning sites (“tenants”) by region so that their employees can get trained on the region’s specific procedures and legislation.

When a new employee joins the company, a new user account is created for them in the LMS. Their new account includes a custom profile field, “Region”. Based on this field, the new employee is allocated to the right tenant and the courses relevant to their region so that they can start their training right away.

With tens of new employees joining each month, HR and L&D don’t have to worry about the new team members getting access to the right training and resources.

Dynamic rules: Automating workflows with Moodle Workplace

Automations within your LMS can range from simple tasks such as allocating a new employee to the right tenant, to more complex processes involving many steps. Even though designing automations can require a bit of strategic thinking, Moodle Workplace enables you to easily create them in a few clicks with Dynamic Rules.

Dynamic rules allow you to define and execute centralized and automated rules using an ‘if-this-then-that’ conditional approach to trigger actions when certain conditions are met.

Just like in any ‘if-this-then-that’ logic, Dynamic Rules have two fundamental elements: the Conditions and the ActionsConditions in Moodle Workplace are applied to users, and are the criteria that have to be met to trigger the Actions. Conditions can be multiple, meaning you can combine more than one to generate an action or actions.

Let’s see an example of a Dynamic Rule, which we’ll call ‘Course finished’:

Condition: (a) “User has completed a course” AND (b) “the course has been completed before a certain Date” AND (c) “User works in a certain department”.

Actions: Enroll the user in the following course, Issue a certificate and Award the user a competency.

In the previous example, all underlined elements are parameters that you can define when creating your conditions and actions.

So, how could an organization apply Moodle Workplace Dynamic Rules to their corporate training?

Automating employee onboarding

A medium-sized company has a generic onboarding course for all its employees. Only after they have taken this course, can they move on to take a second course specific to their department, e.g. Sales. HR could automate onboarding for employees in the Sales department with the following Moodle Workplace Dynamic Rules:

Rule 1: Allocation to onboarding

Conditions

  • Users who are not allocated to ‘General Onboarding Course’

Actions

  • Allocate users to ‘General Onboarding Course’
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Rule 1: Induction for Sales Department

Conditions

  • Users who have completed ‘General Onboarding Course’
  • AND Users who are allocated to the Sales Department

Actions

  • Enroll users to the ‘Induction for Sales Department Course’
  • Send users a notification welcoming them to the course
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This way, HR makes sure that all new employees will have completed the General Onboarding Course before they are enrolled in the following, more specific training.

Like any other feature in Workplace, all the Dynamic Rules that you create can be used as templates with the Migration feature. You can learn more about Dynamic rules in our Moodle Workplace documentation.