Audiences

Audiences allow site-wide user groups to be dynamically populated via a combination of rules within the LMS. Audiences are commonly used for restricting access to objects such as dashboards, courses, programs, certifications, learning plans and goals. This is known as audience based visibility.

Audiences types

Before creating an audience, it is important to know what type of audience you need to create. In a Set audience, members must be added and removed manually, whereas a Dynamic audience will update automatically.

Set audience

Dynamic audience

 

Accessing audiences

The audience management area can be accessed in two ways either via the Administration Block or the Admin Settings on the top right of the screen as shown below.

Go to the Administration Block > Audiences > Audiences

Select Audiences from the core platform column of the Admin Settings menu.

Adding a new audience

To create a new audience click on the Add new audience button and you will be presented with the below screen to populate.

A breakdown of the information to populate in each of the fields is shown below. 

Name	Name your audience, note this will appear throughout the site whenever you utilize audiences so give it a meaningful name.
Context	System: This audience can be used throughout the LMS. Other: Alternatively, you can select a specific course where this audience can be used.
Audience ID	This ID is unique and used to identify an audience when preforming tasks such as bulk user actions. The ID name will be automatically given by default, but it may be useful to rename it giving it a similar title to the name of the audience.
Type	Set: Allows you to manually select and add any user to the group. Dynamic: Automatically populated with users based on rulesets.
Description	Not essential but good practice is to describe the purpose of your audience for other Site Managers (or users who have permissions to view audiences).
Start date	When adding a start date, access to the audience will not be granted until that date. If used on a dynamic audience, audience members will not be automatically updated until this date.
End date	When adding an end date, access provided to this audience will end on that date. If used on a dynamic audience, audience members will not be automatically updated after this date.
Alerts	Do not send alerts: Alerts will not be sent to members when they are added or removed from this group. Send alerts to affected members only: Notifications will be sent to members when they are added to the audience, or when they are removed. Send alerts to all members: As above, but for all members.

Adding members to a 'set' audience

Providing that your audience Type equals 'Set' you will be presented with the Edit members tab. Users can be added individually or via a CSV upload. Below we will show you how to do both.

Adding users individually will involve searching for the user on the Potential users list, once the user is found select the users and click Add which will move them into the audience. If you want to remove a user select the user from the Current users list and click Remove. 

Adding users via CSV

Again you much ensure your audience Type equals 'Set' you will then see the tab Bulk add Members. Next step is to prepare your CSV of users for upload. The system will expect:

• The file format to be saved as a .CSV
• One heading within the file called 'username'
  • • Under the username heading a list of usernames that match existing users on the site. Note if the usernames do not exist or match they will not be added to the audience. 

Once the file has been uploaded, hit the Upload users button, this will now add any users who match to the your audience.

Adding members to a 'dynamic' audience

Providing that your audience Type equals 'Dynamic' you will be presented with the Rule sets tab. Rule sets control how users are added and removed from a dynamic audience. You will be presented with the following screen, below we will explain each of the settings.

Automatically update membership - These checkboxes dictate whether users are automatically added or removed from the audience, when a user meets or no longer meets the rule set criteria.

Membership setting between every role set - This setting determines how the audience rules will behave if you define more than one rule set. It is based on the logical AND and OR operators.

1. If set to AND, then a user will only be added to the audience if they satisfy the conditions of all of the rule sets. (They will be omitted if they fail to satisfy even one ruleset)
2. If set to OR, then a user will be added to the audience if they satisfy the conditions of any of the rule sets. (They only have to satisfy the conditions of a single rule set to be included.)

Note that each ruleset has its own, separate, logical operator to indicate the relationship between the rules within that ruleset.

Use the Add rule dropdown menu to start building your rule set:

The dropdown list provides you with all available options you can use to start creating your rule sets. Depending on which option your select may require you to select/ or add additional information to configure your criteria. For example when you select 'Users email address' you will be asked to provide more information such as, do you which to specific the rule to Equal individual emails or to Contain an email domain. There is flex to configure based on your needs.

Once you finished adding your rules, click on the 'Approve changes' button. 

You can either click on the Overview button or the Members buttons afterwards to review how many users were added or review the list of users who are now part of the audience. You can amend your audiences at any point to include updates to an existing rule sets or to add additional rule sets.

At this point you have simply grouped your users together, your audience is now ready to be used to enrol your users onto either Learning, a Learning Plan, Goals or a Role. Click on any of the tabs below to add. 

Note it is best not to add your audience to any of the objects above until you are ready to launch as you could accidently generate emails.