Introduces the “Offerings” module and how it can be used to manage “self-proctored exams”, which are examinations that the credentialing program delivers itself rather than partnering with a partner like PSI or Prometric.
Curriculum index: Training Curriculum
Last updated: for 11.0.12
Overview
This module introduces the Activity Offerings feature and demonstrates how to configure it.
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the public training site at http://training.learningbuilder.com, you may run into discrepancies caused by an outdated starting point, or because of changes made by other users.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.
You may want to periodically refer back to the product docs at Activity Offerings during this module.
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.
As part of the Office Dog certification process, good boys and girls are asked to demonstrate their competence at tasks like sitting, staying, and not grabbing food off of people’s desks.
These are not tasks that can be easily assessed by computer based testing, so the ASOD cannot partner with organizations such as PSI or Prometric to perform these assessments. Human candidates need to be evaluated in human spaces, and doggos need to be evaluated in doggo spaces.
Therefore, the ASOD has decided to “self-proctor” their exams. They will hold “obedience evaluations” on a set schedule, and would-be Office Dogs will sign up for a specific examination as part of their credential application process.
Business rules for this scenario
The ASOD will publish specific dates, times, and locations of their examinations.
Obedience examinations will be delivered by a Proctor working for the ASOD. At the end of each examination, the proctor will submit an attendance report.
To submit the Certified Office Dog application, applicants must register for, complete, and pass an obedience examination.
Definition of terms
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
Exam Window | The ASOD will offer a series of examinations every quarter. They refer to this as the “window”, e.g. “take your exam within the Spring window”. |
Exam Sitting | This refers to a specific examination date within a window. For instance, the ASOD might offer sittings on the 1st Saturday of the month. Imagine, if you will, that all sittings within the same window will evaluate doggos in the same way, but that the evaluation criteria might evolve between windows. |
Exam Activity | Each exam window will be represented by a unique Activity Definition in LearningBuilder. See below for more details. |
Exam Offering | Each exam sitting will be represented by an Activity Offering in LearningBuilder. See below for more deatils. |
Step 1: Create a Provider Role to “own” the offerings
Some of the changes described here have already been configured in TRAINING, so you may need to change the names of things that you create slightly to avoid duplicates.
For example, if you are following these steps in a system that already has an “Obedience Exam Provider” Role defined, then create a new Role with a slightly different name, and then refer to your newly created Role in later steps.
In LearningBuilder, each “offering” is owned by a Provider. Conceptually, the Provider is the organization that is responsible for “delivering” the offering to Practitioners.
In this example, the American Society of Office Dogs is going to self-proctor its own examinations. This means that the ASOD needs to have a Provider Role.
There are other use cases too, such as allowing 3rd party trainers to deliver the examinations on behalf of the ASOD, but we’re trying to keep things simple to start with.
| 1 | Create a new RoleAs an Admin, go to Admin → Roles and create a new “Obedience Exam Provider” Role.
You can leave everything else at defaults, or make reasonable selections for required fields.  |
| 2 | Assign the Grant Role and Edit Role WorkflowsThe Role Workflows aren’t important for this scenario, so you can reuse existing Workflow definitions.  To reuse an existing Workflow, go to Admin → Workflows and edit the Role - Generic: Grant” Workflow, and then associate it with the new Role.  Do the same thing for the “Role - Generic: Edit” Role too. |
| 3 | Assign the necessary Offering permissionsGo to Admin → Roles → Permissions and grant the following permissions:  |
| 4 | Grant this new Role to the “American Society of Office Dogs” user accountIn this scenario, the ASOD is the only organization that will offer the obedience examinations, so it’s the only organization that needs the new Role. Use Admin → Members to search for asod@example.com and then grant it the Exam Provider Role.  |
Note: you may have to use the Step 2: Create an Activity representing the exam window
In an Offerings implementation, there must be at least one Activity Definition that represents the “thing that will be offered”. In this scenario, that “thing” is an obedience examination.
Lots of different use cases exist, but for this scenario we are assuming that the ASOD will create a unique Activity Definition per “exam window” that they will hold.
First, we need to create a new Activity Type, and then we will create an Activity Definition for the first of those exam windows.
| 1 | Create a new Create Offering WorkflowYes, it’s awkward to create this Workflow before you’ve created the Activity Type or its Create Activity Workflow. We’re working on improving that. In the meantime, suck it up, buttercup ;) Go to Admin → Workflows and create a new Create Offering Workflow. This will be used when the ASOD adds a specific instance (or offering) of an obedience examination.  This Workflow defines the data that will be collected when the ASOD creates a new examination offering. Configure a data entry Step as shown below.  Go ahead and create a “Complete Successfully” Action for now. We will edit this definition later to add the Proctor step.
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| 2 | Create a new Activity TypeAs an Admin, go to Admin → Activities → Activity Types and create a new Activity Type.
In the “Offerings” section, configure the following:
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| 3 | Create a new Create Activity WorkflowYes, it’s awkward to create this Workflow after you’ve defined the Create Offering Workflow. See the other purple note above. Go to Admin → Workflows and create a new Create Activity Workflow. This will be used when the ASOD creates the Activity that represents the examination itself. Link this Workflow to the newly created Activity Type.  Create a simple data entry Step to collect information about the examination, as shown below: 
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| 4 | Create the new Exam ActivityLog in as the American Society of Office Dogs and go to Provider → Activities You could also log in as a user account that is a staff of the ASOD account, such as Arlene Admin. Create a new Activity as shown below.
 Fill out the Create Activity Workflow and publish the new Activity. |
Step 3: Create Offerings (exam sittings)
We now have an Activity Definition representing an exam window. The next step is to create one or more Offerings that represent the specific dates and times that the examinations will be held.
| 1 | Manage Offerings from the Activity List pageLog in as the American Society of Office Dogs and go to Provider → Activities. Filter the list by Activity Type and you should see the Activity we just created in the prior step.  If the Activity Type supports Offerings, there will be a column called Offerings that shows the number of Offerings that have been created for that activity. |
| 2 | Create a new OfferingNone exist yet, so click on that link (circled above) to go to the Manage Offerings page for the “Obedience Examination - Summer 2023” Activity.  Click the “Add Offering” button and give it a title like “Ohio (Summer 2023)”. Then fill out the Create Offering Workflow as shown:  A note about “Capacity” By definition, an Offering is an instance of a specific Activity, offered at a specific date and time, and with a specific “seating” capacity. This capacity can represent the number of seats in a classroom, the number of applicants allowed in an exam, etc. |
| 3 | Create more Offerings (optional)If you want, you can create more Offerings as well. If you want to do the bare minimum, you can move on with just the one. |
Step 4: Allow applicants to sign up for an exam sitting
We now have an Activity representing the exam window, and an Activity Offering representing an exam sitting on a specific date/time.
But how do people (or doggos) actually sign up for a sitting? That’s where the Seat Assignment attribute comes into play. It allows a Learning Plan Instance or Activity Instance to “request” one of the “seats” in the Offering.
We will be setting up this scenario:
To implement this we will need an Activity Definition to control the process by which an applicant signs up and takes an exam.
| 1 | Create a new Activity TypeGo to Admin → Activities → Activity Types and create a new Activity Type
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| 2 | Create a new Create Activity WorkflowCreate a new Create Activity Workflow for the new Activity Type.  |
| 3 | Add an “Activity Filter” to the Create Activity WorkflowYou can configure the Create Activity however you want, but it must contain an Activity Filter Attribute. The applicant will ultimately interact with a Seat Assignment Attribute to choose a specific exam sitting (Offering) to attend. The Seat Assignment therefore needs to know which Offerings to offer as options. The Activity Filter provides that information to the Seat Assignment. It defines a set of criteria that are used to filter the list of Offerings, for instance so that different Learning Plans can be associated with different exam windows. For more information, refer to the product docs at Activity Filter Attribute  There isn’t much to configure on the Activity Filter itself. All of the relevant data is provided when an Activity Definition is created. |
| 4 | Create a new Complete Activity WorkflowYou will also need to create a Complete Activity Workflow that controls how the Applicant will sign up for a specific exam sitting.  |
| 5 | Add a “Seat Assignment” to the Complete Activity WorkflowAs part of the Complete Activity Workflow, we will want the applicant to choose a specific exam sitting (Offering) that they want to attend. The Seat Assignment Attribute is designed for that purpose. It will display a list of available Offerings and allow the applicant to choose a specific one. To do that, add a Seat Assignment Attribute to a Workflow Step and configure it as shown:  Seat Assignment “Search Experience” The Seat Assignment supports two different user experiences. The simplest is “Cascading Drop Downs”, in which the applicant selects an Offering from a set of dropdown menus. This is designed for relatively small number of available options. The “Search Popup” option is designed for cases with a large number of available options. It is more complex to set up, however, because it relies on /wiki/spaces/DOCS/pages/1024000004. This training will use the Cascading Drop Down option to keep things simple. |
| 6 | Create a new “Take Obedience Exam” ActivityThis is an example of the Activity pattern in which there is only one Activity Definition in an Activity Type. Refer back to the 201 training on Activity patterns for more details. Create a new Activity of the new type you just created, owned by the ASOD Provider.  Configure the “Activity Filter” like this:
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Step 5: Modify the Office Dog application to require an examination
We’ve now set up an Activity that represents taking an exam and configured a Seat Assignment Attribute on it.
The next step is to modify a Learning Plan to actually use this new Activity. This is where everything finally comes together in a UI!
| 1 | Add a new Task Group to hold the exam ActivitiesGo to Admin → Credentials → Certified Office Dog → Certified Office Dog Application and create a new Task Group for the examination.
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| 2 | Add a pre-added exam taskAdd a pre-added Activity to the Learning Plan representing the exam sitting. If you’re following along exactly as stated above, then you would add the “Take Obedience Exam” Activity here. This is NOT the Exam Activity; it’s the Activity that contains the Seat Assignment that will refer to the Exam Activity.  |
Step 6: Try it out!
We’re now ready to see the fruits of all of your labor pay off!
| 1 | Start a new Office Dog applicationLog in as a user that does not have an in-progress Office Dog application and then start a new Office Dog application. You should see a placeholder for the exam sitting. From the login page, choose “New Doggo” for a pre-staged account that is eligible to start an Office Dog application, but doesn’t have one started yet.  If you log in as a user that already has an in-progress Office Dog application, it won’t have the Obedience Exam Task Group! Adding and removing Task Group definitions does not affect existing Learning Plan Instances, so the new Group you added won’t exist for any of the pre-existing LPIs. For this reason, you’ll probably want to discard your configuration changes when you’re done with this training module or else they may cause issues with some of the pre-staged data for other modules. |
| 2 | Schedule an exam sittingClick the “Schedule Exam” button to launch the Complete Activity Workflow for the “Take Obedience Exam” Activity. This Workflow contains the Seat Assignment attribute, which looks like this:  Make a selection and submit the Workflow popup. |
| 3 | View the Offering as the ASODLog back in as the ASOD provider account (asod@example.com) and go to Provider → Activity Offerings. Here you will see a list of all Offerings linked to the ASOD account, as well as a summary of their capacity. You should see at least 1 confirmed seat based on the selection you just made as an applicant.  Click on the “eyeball” icon and you’ll see a list of all attendees for a specific Offering.  |
Step 7: Allow proctors to report exam results
This section is still in development, so it’s lacking some details. The big picture pieces are listed below.
Allow Proctors to report results
Add a Step to the Create Offering Workflow so that Proctors can submit some final summary data before closing out the Offering