Activity Provider

Many programs have rules that govern the types of continuing education courses that will be accepted on a re-certification application. These rules exist to promote specific quality standards, to ensure that the education courses promote the goals of the licensing program, and to provide another revenue stream for the board.

The general setup is usually along the lines of:

1. An organization registers to be an "Approved Activity Provider" and completes a "Grant Role" workflow that establishes the "Provider" role. There may be a fee collected as part of this registration.
2. Once the organization is approved, they obtain access to the "Provider" area in LearningBuilder.
3. The Provider area includes the ability to create new Activities by launching a Create Activity workflow.
4. The Create Activity workflow usually includes a Payment attribute and a "review" step in which a board administrator reviews and approves the activity.
5. The re-certification Learning Plan will have a Task Group configured to show all Activities of a specific type. Thus, the approved activities will be selectable.

Staff

When supporting organizations, such as Providers, it is often desirable for the organization itself to "own" certain data (such as educational courses), while still granting the individual employees of that organization their own login to LearningBuilder. This is supported through the use of Staff roles that allow individual users to be associated with an organization such that they log in with their own credentials, but can be granted rights to manage data belonging to the organization.

NOTE: Unlike Member Roles, Staff Roles are not managed by a workflow. They capture a relationship between a Member and an Organization but cannot use the workflow engine to capture additional metadata about the relationship.

When an organization is created and a Provider Role is granted, a "Self-Referential Staff Record" will be created for the organization. That is, the organization will be a staff member of itself. This means that the someone can log in with the organization account and perform any of the tasks allowed to a staff member with that role.

Provider and Staff Roles

There are two types of roles associated with Providers: Organization roles and Staff roles.

An Organization role is granted to the Provider. As stated above, this grants the provider access to the Provider area, which is where new activities can be created.

A Staff role associates an individual with an organization and grants the staff member the ability to manage data belonging to the organization. 

As with all other roles, permissions can be granted to both Organization and Staff roles. Note however, there is not a way to change a staff member's role or grant additional roles.

When a new provider is created and an Organization role is granted successfully, several things will happen:

1. A member record of type Organization will be created
2. A member role record will be created for the for the organization role that was granted.
3. A staff record will be created and the Staff role designated to be assigned automatically will created for the organization. This is the "Self-Referential Staff Record" that allows the Organization account to act as a staff member.
4. A member role record for the Organization Staff role will be created for the organization.

Creating a Provider Role

1. On the Admin menu, click Roles.
2. Click the Add Role button.
3. Enter a Title.
4. In the Role Type list, select Member.
5. In the Member Type list, select Organization.
6. In the Staff Role to assign automatically list, select the role that will be assigned to the "Self-Referential Staff Record". When this Provider Role is granted to an Organization member, a Staff record will be automatically created that identifies the organization account as its own staff member. This record will be assigned the specified Staff Role.
7. Enter the Button Label for the Grant Role workflow button. This button appears on the My Account page when a user is allowed to obtain this Role.
8. In the Button Color list, select the the color of the button that launches the Grant Role workflow. This only applies when there is no existing workflow to continue; if an existing workflow will be continued, then the button color will be controlled by the workflow status instead (i.e. orange if in an active state, gray if owned by someone else, etc).
9. Click Save.

Creating a Staff Role

1. On the Admin menu, click Roles.
2. Click the Add Role button.
3. Enter a Title.
4. In the Role Type list, select Staff.
5. Click Save.