The Course Catalog asset provides custom views of your courses, so, for example, your employees can see the courses that are available to them, which ones they have signed up for, and the ones they have completed – all organized on a single page.
The Course Catalog is also a useful way for organizations to keep track of who has signed up for what courses and how many courses they have completed and how many are pending.
Containers and collection items
The Course Catalog asset is made up of Container Groups that contain collections of courses. Each Container group defines the group of courses under that section, which users sees when they view the page. For example, you can set up the course catalog to display only the courses that a user has signed up to, grouped in different sections (containers), for learning plans, courses with sessions, and online courses. Each course can have a status bar, Launch and Read More buttons.
In addition to being able to filter container groups according to the type of course , you can further filter the collection items that the container is made up of. For example, you can choose that a container group contains certain course categories such as webinars and event, course groups such as Product Training and Safety Procedures, or curriculum repositories shared between domains. Being able to filter on these two levels gives you endless possibilities for displaying lists of courses for very specific scenarios.
Learning plans and curriculums
Before you can display your learning plans from the Course Catalog, you need to make sure that you have a slide set up with your learning plans on them. You can then reference the CAID of the slide with the learning plans on them in your course catalog. This ensures that your learning plans are set up properly on the page.
If you get Error No CAID for a learning plan, this is because you haven't specified the CAID of the learning plan in the course catalog.
If you have subdomains to your domain, you can share courses between domains by connecting them with a curriculum. You can specify that the Course Catalog displays these by using Repository as the Collection type.
Approval
If you have set up your course as requiring approval before users can sign up to it, when a user signs up to the course, they will receive a notification that their enrollment is pending approval and a Pending button shows up under the course in the Course Catalog. Their manager (or whoever is specified as the approver of the course) receives a notification from which they can approve. Once approved, the Pending button changes to a Launch button in the Course Catalog.
Layout
You can make changes to how the Course Catalog is displayed, in several ways:
- By editing the variables on the Templates tab
- By changing the CSS in the skin
- By changing the labels on the Labels tab
- By changing the width on the Layout tab
You can change the variables included in each of the templates on the Templates tab. You can add one of the variables provided or you can edit the ones used in your template, for example, by deleting it or renaming it.
If you want to change the styling, you can view the CSS class in the HTML and make changes to that class in the skin.
If you want to change the text on the default labels used in the different elements of the tiles, for example, the buttons or the header, you can easily change this on the Labels tab.
You can also specify the width of the tiles of your course catalog (according to Bootstrap columns) by specifying this for the container on the Layout tab, for example, you can specify that the container list takes up six columns (for very wide tiles - two per line) or one (for very small tiles - 12 per line).