An Example of Learning Environments and Learner Groups

Following is an example that illustrates the basic concepts of learning environments and learner groups.

Suppose you have just completed an analysis of the different learning requirements throughout your organization, and have decided on four learning environments to reflect the structure of your business: sales, finance, production, and human resources.

For the sales environment you identify a broad category of sales, plus two subcategories: customer care and sales support. For the human resources environment you identify a broad category of human resources and two subcategories: managing the workforce and teamwork.

Employees in the Sales division need access to all classes within the sales environment plus selected teamwork classes in the human resources environment. You do not want sales employees to access any other classes in human resources.

Here is how you might set up your catalog to meet these requirements:

1. Create the learning environments.

   Defining environments consists of naming them and establishing the default values that are passed down to the classes created within the environments. Each time you create a learning environment, the system automatically creates a matching learner group. You assign each learner to one or more learner groups.

2. Associate the sales environment with the sales administrator, the human resources environment with the human resources administrator, and so forth.

   This enables administrators to create the categories and courses for their learning environments.

3. The human resources administrator defines two categories—human resources and teamwork—and associates both with the human resources environment, the administrator's own environment.

   Ignore the Managing the Workforce category for this example.

   The human resources administrator also associates, or shares, both categories with the sales environment, giving the sales administrator the ability to update these categories as well.

4. Administrators assign learner groups to the categories to specify who can access the categories in the catalog.

   The human resources administrator associates the human resources learner group with the human resources and teamwork categories. The sales administrator associates the sales learner group with both categories.

5. Administrators define the courses within the categories.

   Within the teamwork category, the human resources administrator creates the course, "Being a Team Player," and associates it with the human resources environment and human resources learner group. The human resources administrator also shares this course with the sales learning environment. The sales administrator can then access the course and associate it with the sales learner group.

As the human resources administrator adds classes to the teamwork category, he or she can share them with the sales administrator (by associating them with the sales environment) and thereby enable the sales administrator to make the classes available to the sales learner group.

This table summarizes the setup that is required for users in the sales division to access the "Being a Team Player" course: