As Organisations change, from time to time Certifications on the LMS would require to be updated. For example:
A business has been told that the business needs have changed and that its Health & Safety Certification needs to change from 1 year to 2 years. They would now like advice on what is the best way that they can proceed to do this as they want to ensure that all users that are currently assigned fall in line and that there is not a mismatch of data.
Steps to consider
When in the Certification tab of a Certification the below shows, what this means is if any changes are made here now (say updating the amount of time that the certification is active for) it will not update for any user that is currently certified or assigned.
Users assigned will only follow the new updates once they recertify, any user that is assigned before this time will follow the settings that were in place when they were assigned. Any user assigned after the change will follow the new changes.
The changes referred to in this document is shown as below
With the above example, it is not advised that a Site Manager simply goes in and changes it from 1 year to 2 years as those certified at the moment will remain active for 1 year only! If this is what the Site Manager would like to do, then to keep everything in order the certification needs to be rebuilt using the new settings.
When rebuilding a Certification, it is important to advise the following:
- Take a Certification completion report based on the Certification in question
- Take a course completion report for courses within the certification (best to filter this down via the audience assigned to the certification).
- Take a course completion including a history report based again on the courses within the certification.
The main reason why we take the reports is to discover who at the moment is either in their window open period or in an expired state.
Why we do this
If a user is in their window open period or expired at the moment when they are assigned to the new certification they will be treated like it is their first time taking the certification and therefore previous states will be ignored as previous completions will not be picked up due to being archived off.
Site Managers will want to establish who currently is in their window open period and expired from the now old certification.
Important Note
When rebuilding a certification, the Enrolment Message is automatically added to any new certification. If the Site Manager adds any more messages along with the enrolment message there is a chance that these messages will be sent and users may receive multiple messages at once. To mitigate this risk, it is advised that site-wide messages are disabled during this time (24 hours is the recommended period) and once everyone is back into the new certification successfully, then, emails can be enabled again.
The next steps after the above
Site Managers will then use the Course Completion including history reporting source and complete the following:
- Compile a list of those in their window open period along with their previous completion
- Create an RPL CSV with those who have previous completions
After the above is done, you are now ready to rebuild the certification. Below are the steps to be followed:
- Rebuild the new certification
- Ask for emails to be disabled site-wide via the Support
- Un-assign the audience from the old certification
- Wait for a cron run (Approximately every 2 hours) *You will know this has occurred when the number assigned on the previous certification has dropped to zero
- Assign the audience to the new certification
- RPL in the previous completion dates
- Wait then 24 hours for the LMS to calculate the dates of the certification