Introductory example showing how Staff roles can be used with Organization type Members.
Curriculum index: Training Curriculum
Last updated: for 11.0.10
Overview
This module introduces the concepts of Providers and Organization Staff and serves as a foundation for additional training around these concepts.
If you are a Heuristics employee, you should go through training in your local development environment or in a personalized training instance so that you can reset to a known, clean starting point as needed.
If you are referencing the public training site at http://training.learningbuilder.com, you may run into discrepancies caused by an outdated starting point, or because of changes made by other users. Please contact us for assistance if that website does not match this documentation.
Setting the stage…
The TRAINING system features the American Society of Office Dogs (ASOD), a credentialing program that awards specialty credentials to canines with a demonstrated ability to behave in an office environment.
However, few doggos are born with an innate ability to behave well in busy human spaces, so there needs to exist training courses that can teach those skills.
ASOD does not want to develop and deliver those training courses themselves; at the end of the day, they are office workers, not dog trainers, and they lack the experience to teach the finer parts of sitting and staying.
Therefore, ASOD has established a “marketplace” to connect doggos with dreams of greatness with reputable, reliable trainers that know what ASOD expects. It works like this:
Trainers register in LearningBuilder as a “Provider” and then enter details of their training courses;
ASOD reviews the courses and certifies them as being worth a specific number of “training hours”;
Doggos take these courses and then record them on their applications (Learning Plans) to satisfy the submission requirements.
This module explores how these things are configured in LearningBuilder, paying special attention to the concept of “Staff users”.
This module focuses on steps 1 and 2 of the process, which comprise the “apply for eligibility” process. Subsequent modules will cover the backend processing of the application you submit.
Step 1: Register as a Provider
From the login screen, use the “Become a Provider” button on the left to register for a new account.
Enter all of your (Fido’s) account information. You will need to use an email address not already present in the TRAINING database. Click the orange Submit button when finished.
After submitting the form, you will be asked to confirm ownership of the email address by entering a code that you were emailed. You can copy the code from the email, or click the link in the email instead.
After creating an account, you will be asked to identify the primary contact at your organization.
Step 2: Add some Staff people
After you finish registration, you will land by default on the Provider → Activities page.
But since this module is just as much about Staff as Providers, let’s take a quick detour…
Click on My Account → Staff to view a list of staff users on your account. (Surprise! There aren’t any yet)
Unfortunately, Organizations cannot currently manage their own staff records. This is still an administrative setup task. Log in as an Administrator, navigate to the newly created member’s profile page, and use the Staff option from there.
Use the Add Staff button to add a new staff member.
The new staff member won’t be able to log in yet, because they don’t have a password. Click the edit link to access their profile and set one.Once the staff member is created, you can log back in as the Provider user and you’ll see the new Staff member in the list.
Step 3: Log in as the staff member and add an Activity
The whole point of staff is this:
Staff of an Organization can log into LearningBuilder with their own personal email address and password and then “act on” the Organization’s account.
This allows the Organization owner to maintain a “master account” and allows multiple employees or affiliates to log in without sharing passwords.
So, let’s log in as that newly created Staff account and give it a shot!
Go back to the login screen and log in as the new Staff user. (If you have trouble logging in, make sure you assigned a password to the account when you created it!)
By default, you will land on the Provider → Activity List page after logging in. This will show you the Activity Definitions belonging to your parent Organization. Since this is a newly created Provider the list will be empty; let’s add one.
Choose an Activity Type and enter a name for your training course. Note that the Provider and Contact will already be set for you.
Complete the first step of the Create Activity Workflow, describing your training activity.
In the real world, providers typically pay a fee to get their training courses approved like this. Those fees are a revenue stream for the credentialing program and help cover the costs of the review process. But to keep it simple for training, just pretend you made a payment and then click “Submit for Review”
If you want to, you can continue the Activity review process by logging in as an Administrator and going to the Activity Approvals queue.
The newly created Activity is now on the 3rd step of its Create Activity Workflow, which is configured to be performed by the Admin role.
However, the point of this step was to show how Staff can submit Activities on behalf of their parent Organization, and I think we’ve made our point…
Step 4: What else can Staff accounts do?
In addition to managing Activities on behalf of their parent Organization, Staff accounts also have limited access to the Organization’s profile account.
Log in as the staff account you created earlier.
Go to My Account → Providers to see a list of all Organizations you are associated with.
Click the edit icon and you will see the Provider’s profile page. There’s not a lot that you can do here, but you can view the communications history. Go ahead and do that now.
All Staff users can read the Communications History for the parent organization, so that they can stay abreast of important notices sent to the root account.
