Sharing content or courses with different teams using Moodle Workplace

Moodle Workplace is a flexible enterprise learning management platform that streamlines employee learning, onboarding, and compliance training. 

As a multi-tenant software, Moodle Workplace allows a single software program to serve many clients and share content via multi-tenancy, either using shared courses or spaces (keep reading to find out how).

Tenants are distinct entities with their own appearance, structure, users, and learning entities. They’re essential for representing many self-contained business units within an organization. Multi-tenancy is built as a single instance of Moodle Workplace, serving several branches or divisions of your organization, different campuses, or even different customers, which are called “tenants”. Data and configuration are virtual partitioned and each client organization works with a customized virtual application instance.

Multi-tenancy refers to the ability to configure numerous tenants with various themes and permissions, while keeping them separate so that users in one tenant don’t see users in another. Users, hierarchies, roles, dynamic rules, theme settings, reports, and learning entities are all unique to each tenancy (courses, programs, and certifications).

Why is sharing content or courses important?

There are several reasons why sharing content or courses via multi-tenancy is useful for organizations, including:

• Efficient onboarding tasks: If a company is onboarding a lot of employees, partners or customers in different tenants and the onboarding process has shared courses, it will be more efficient to have those courses available in multiple tenants.
• Avoiding repetitive tasks: Through automating enrollment, using dynamic rules for specific courses or programs to certain groups of users, no matter the tenant.
• Preventing course duplicates and optimizing already existing content: If a course is already created in another tenant, it’s useful to be able to reuse the course content and make it available in other tenants. It can also be used as a basis to create new course content.
• Promoting collaborative learning : Through sharing courses, users from different tenants can learn collaboratively across the organization.

What types of content can be shared between trainers and learners?

Moodle Workplace allows courses, certifications, programs, and certificates to be shared between tenants.

How is content shared between trainers and learners?

Now that we know why it’s useful to share content or courses with different teams, let’s look at how this can be done.

The first option is Shared courses, which give companies the option to share content with multiple tenants.

Each tenant in Moodle Workplace has their own course category and their respective courses. However, an organization may also choose to share some courses with tenants, such as an onboarding or business overview course.

To guarantee Moodle core interoperability, all users (learners and trainers) enrolled in a course see users from different domains while exploring the course. Organizations can use shared courses to:

• Determine who can access content. For example, if only users from two tenants should have access to a course, only those users should be enrolled in the course.
• Allow personnel from various tenancies to learn together or a trainer from one tenant to be the trainer for all learners, regardless of their tenant.
• Automatically assign different entities to different groups to study separately, without the requirement of a forced group mode.

Each tenant typically has its own course category and its own courses. The manual enrollment method has been modified, so the user picker only displays users from the current tenant. However, there are scenarios where a business might want to have courses shared among tenants.

To provide courses across tenants, you need to create a course category and adjust the permissions as follows:

1. In Site administration > Learning > Course and category management select Permissions from the options drop-down of the category that will contain the shared courses.
2. Filter by or search for the capability moodle/category:viewcourselist
3. Grant permission to the Authenticated user role

Any course that’s placed in the ‘shared courses” category will be seen across tenants.

Please note that multi-tenancy doesn’t apply to the course content. This means that if a user (either a learner or a trainer) is enrolled in a course, they’ll see users from other tenants while browsing the course. This could be forum posts, the list of course participants, gradebooks, reports, or any other module that displays course participants.

If you share courses between different tenants and want users from each tenant to learn independently, they must belong to different groups, and the course has to be in a separate group mode (preferably forced). Allocation to separate groups is done automatically when a shared course is part of a program.

Please review the ‘Trainer” and “Non-editing trainer’ roles in the course and ensure that they do not have the access groups capability. The trainers should also be allocated to the relevant groups.

Share content and courses with Shared space

Shared space enables the sharing of entities across all tenants. It works like a special tenant where users can create supported entities to be available to other tenants. The following Workplace tools are supported in Shared space:

• Programs
• Certifications
• Organization structure
• Dynamic rules
• Report builder

For example, if an onboarding program is created, it will appear in the list of programs for each tenant. Managers and learners will see shared programs on their dashboards and in reports in the same way they see any other program.

When you are in the Shared space, any supported entities created are available to all tenants and can be considered site-wide entities. Shared entities are labelled with a Shared space indicator.

To use the Shared space feature, the site administrator simply has to enable the Shared space feature once using one of these two options:

• Choose Shared space from the tenant switcher and select Enable Shared space. If you select the ‘Not now’ button, the option will be removed from the tenant switcher, and enabling the feature will only be possible from the tenant menu.
• Go to the tenant menu (via the Workplace launcher) and select Enable Shared space. The shared space will be created as before, and the option will reappear in the tenant switcher.

Please Note that enabling the Shared space feature can’t be undone; once enabled, it will remain that way.

How to share courses between learners and teachers?

Only learners from the same group can share content and activities between courses. A grouping is a collection of groups within a course which can be used to direct tasks at one or more groups in the course to work collaboratively.

A group or grouping can be used on two levels:

• Course level. The group mode defined at the course level is the default mode for all activities within that course. To use groups you need to set a group mode in Administration > Course administration > Edit settings.
• Activity level. Each activity that supports groups can also have its own group mode. If the course setting ‘Force group mode” is set to “Yes’ then the option to define the group mode for individual activities isn’t available. If it is set to “No”, then the teacher may change the group mode.

Using groups with discussion forums allows educators to manage interaction between learners. Separate groups mean only learners in the same group can see and participate in discussions within a particular forum. Visible groups allow learners to see other groups’ discussions, but only participate in their own groups’ discussions.

Creating a more efficient and productive workplace