As Organisations change, from time to time Programs on the LMS would require to be updated. For example:
A business has been told that they need to update the content provided for their Onboarding Program, this will mean that courses are removed from the Course Set and replaced by new courses. The business already has an Onboarding Program in place, therefore will require an update to be made to the already live Program.
Steps to consider
When editing a live Program, at the top there will be a gold banner that displays as below:
What this means is that any changes that are made to this Program will affect those assigned. Unlike making changes to a live Certification, making changes to a Program is slightly easier with fewer repercussions.
Mostly the only tab within a Program that can have changes made to it that will affect users assigned would be the Content tab, here is where the courses that users will take as part of the program would sit. Taking the example given above, this is where the changes need to be made to comply with the Business needs.
What would happen if the content is changed?
- Users who have already completed the Program.
The short answer here is nothing. It is important to remember that if a change is made to a Program, those users who are currently showing as 100% will not be affected. If a content change is made to the Program that a user who has 100% completion has not taken the newly added course, their overall completion of 100% will remain unaffected. Once a user reaches 100% within a Program, it will remain there regardless of changes (deletion of the Program will remove this.) unless it is manually removed by a Site Manager or another role with appropriate permissions.
- Reporting
Reporting is probably the most impacted when a change has been made to a Program, particularly the content of said Program. If the reporting source Program Completion is being used there would be nothing telling that a change has been made to the content (remember a user will remain at 100% if having previously completed before the change).
If the reporting source is Program Overview or Program Overview Export, this is where the content changes will show. This reporting source allows for the addition of the courses that sit within the Program to be added to the report, so effectively it would look like the below:
Notice how all courses within the Program are complete as is the Program itself. If a new course is added to the Program, this report would update to look like the below:
With the new course added, the report will automatically update so that the newly added course/s show up and will show up as 'Not Yet Started'. However, if the user has already completed the course that is being added then their completion date will show up within the report.
It is important to note, that if the content has been updated and the user does have a completion within that course then the completion dates can look a little off. For example, take a second look at the example above and look at the Program completion date and the Course completion date:
Note that this example user completed the Program on 20th Jan 2022, however a few months later they completed 2 courses in May 2022. What this states is that the content of the Program had been changed, however the user did already have completions on the courses that was added to the Program, however the user had completions in the future to when they completed the Program.
- Users who have not yet completed the Program
If there were to be changes made to the Program that had users assigned but they had not yet completed the Program, again, they would remain unaffected by the changes. What would happen here is their percentage complete would adjust to take into consideration the new courses and if they have completed it the percentage would increase. If they have not completed it, it would decrease. The user who is still in progress will need to take the newly added course to complete the program.
Why is this important to consider?
This is important to consider due to the reporting behind a Program, while it is fine to make changes to a Program that will not affect any user who has already completed the Program. However, the reporting for users who have completed the Program would be affected. While the person making the changes to the Program understands the reporting that will be impacted as a result of this change, think of others who do not understand the changes but may still be viewing the reports such as Line Manger's.