Managing Seat Assignments for an Offering

Owned by Seth Petry-Johnson
Last updated: Oct 21, 2022
3 min read

This document talks about the “Manage Offerings” page.

See also:

Overview

The Offerings system supports a “registration and approval” flow for assigning attendees to a specific Offering.

It works like this:

  • A Seat Assignment Attribute represents a potential attendee’s request to attend the Offering.

  • Seat Assignments can start out in a “pending” state, indicating that a request was made but not yet approved.

  • Administrators, Reviewers, or Proctors can, through standard Workflow engine mechanics, view the pending assignments and can confirm or deny them. At the same time, a specific “seat number” can be assigned if needed.

The administrative portions are performed using the “Manage Offerings” page that shows a list of all Offerings for a specific Activity Definition.

In the “Course Sessions” use case, this allows Providers to see all of the seat requests for all offerings of a specific course.

In the “Exam Scheduling” use case, this allows Exam Providers to see all seat requests for all exam sittings within a specific window.

In both scenarios, the provider may want to use this information to shut down courses or exam sittings that don’t meet a critical mass of attendees, so a “top down view” of all of the Seat Assignments is useful.

The “Manage Offerings” page

Page

Purpose

Notes / Required Permission

Page

Purpose

Notes / Required Permission

Admin 
→ Activity List
→ Manage Offerings

Displays a list of all Offerings for a specific Activity.

Use cases:

  • Administrative review of an Activity

  • Administrator providing support to a Provider

Requires permission AdminArea:ManageOfferings

Provider 
→ Activity List 
→ Manage Offerings

Shows a Provider a list of Offerings for a specific Activity that they own.

Use cases:

  • Providers managing the Activities that they own (e.g. Exams they administer, or Courses they provide)

Requires that the current user be the Provider that owns the Activity, or a Staff member of that Provider.

Requires permission ProviderArea:ManageOfferings

Reassigning Seat Assignments

This feature is designed for complex, self-hosted exam scenarios and it requires the use of a custom SQL procedure to implement the seat assignment logic.

This features does NOT apply to implementations that directly expose the Seat Assignment attribute to the applicant or attendee to choose a specific Offering.

For more information, refer to Configuring a custom Seat Assignment procedure

If an organization is hosting their own exams then they may have complex business rules governing who can attend which exam sittings.

For instance, the organization might ask all attendees to indicate their desired sittings, and then assign them to actual Offerings at a later date. This allows the organization to maximize their efficiency by cancelling potential sittings that failed to garner enough interest, diverting those attendees to other sittings instead.

The “Reassign” button on the Manage Offerings page will clear out all Seat Assignments for the Activity and will re-assign all pending Seat Assignments using the SQL procedure configured on the Activity Type.