Logic | Course Templates

New clients at Administrate commonly wonder: 

• What’s the difference between courses and events?

At its most basic:

• Courses are the training products that you offer; it’s what makes up your catalog.
  • Course templates in Administrate allow you to define the most common default settings you wish to carry through to every event you create from it, thus saving you lots of setup time.
  • Course templates are designed to house all the critical data that helps you manage your catalog
  • From a single course template, you may make many events that run throughout the year, and potentially with different instructors and students.
• An event is created from a course template, and is when you actually train learners on the content.
  • Any number of events can be created from the same course template
  • Default settings from that template pull through to the event and can be updated as desired 
  • Select your start date and location and you are done

Another common question: 

• Do I need to create a course template to run my events?

Yes. Every event is based off of a  course template, and though there is a minimal amount of data required to create a course template - course title and course code - there’s tons of additional information you can supply there to ease your burden, which is a primary purpose of course templates. Let’s take a deeper look.

What is the Purpose of Course Templates in Administrate?

As you’re getting your course templates in place in Administrate, consider:

• How do learners find your content in a catalog? On your website?
• Who can teach the course?
• What content do you want students and instructors to engage with in the classroom? On the student portal?
• What resources are required for your training events for the course?
• What is the course's price? Does this differ by location or for another reason?
• What's the typical schedule for an event look like?
• What's required to successfully complete the event and gain an achievement?

Answering these questions will help you create Course Templates that ease your event creation burden, as well as make it easy for students to find and register for your events.

Course Template Purpose and Logic

Course templates play a few primary roles. They:

1. Provide metadata for your course catalog and how potential students interact with it on your student portal and website. Specifically, the Basic Info tab allows you to:
   • Identify the category and subcategory the content falls in, which may be more than one
     • Logic: this drives how potential students navigate to find it on your student portal and website
   • Identify learning tags for your content
     • Logic: this aids search efforts for titles and allows you to include alternate naming conventions and consideration for common misspellings 
   • Provide description information that can be pulled to your course page to help potential learners identify if it’s right for them
     • Logic: this helps students understand the learning value of your content, prerequisites, related coursework, and more

All this metadata is exposed to API, meaning you can build your catalog out the way you want and this connection manages what should and should not be seen.

2. Ease your event creation efforts by identifying default settings you want to pull to every event. For instance, you can identify:
   • The subset of approved instructors who can teach events
     1. If this is not defined, anyone identified as an instructor can be selected from the personnel dropdown on the event
     2. If this is identified, only those instructors will fill the dropdown selector on your event, thus ensuring proper credentials and skillset
   • The content that needs to be available to personnel and students taking the course
     1. This includes documents and learning resources you wish to be available to instructors and administrators of the event; for example, class handouts
     2. This also includes content you wish to be available on the student portal to students and instructors registered to an event from the given course template. For example, .pdf documentation, videos, Scorm
   • The resources required to administer the training, which could be classrooms, equipment, and more
     1. You can define which sessions require which resources
     2. Resources booked on events become unavailable to other events in the same time block  
   • Default pricing you want pulled into events
     1. Normal pricing for given locations around the globe can be identified, and in proper currency to accommodate differences from event to event
     2. Students are able to be registered in alternate amounts and currencies on the same events
   • Achievement handling for students successfully completing the coursework
     1. Define achievement handling for every learning mode the course content is offered in
     2. Identify if the achievement is extended automatically when pass criteria has been achieved, including allowed absences
        
        
3. Allow you to identify the scheduling logic for the training content, creating the ability for you to stand your events up rapidly and in bulk. Here, you can set defaults for:
   • Learning mode
   • Duration
   • Start & end times
   • Registration logic