LMS Content Types

This page demonstrates content types available for the LMS and what they do.

The Content Manager is accessible from Content icon Content Manager in the main navigation, which opens a sub navigation displaying 2 categories: Collection types and Single types. Each category contains the available collection and single content-types which were created beforehand using the Content-type Builder.

In some content types, for some fields setting or updating is restricted to avoid confusion or system issues when they would be changed, but are not supposed to. You can also be confident in these cases that nothing actually breaks or can break.

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Click the search icon in the sub navigation to use a text search and find one of your content-types more quickly!

Categories

Although the name would imply, that this is an actual category, this is more of a tag. You can create categories and then assign them to courses. They then will show as Classification on the Course Overview information.

Certificates

You are able to create and manage multiple certificates and set specific ones to courses. They will be used as a base to generate A PDF upon completion of a course. To create such base, there is a powerful PDF builder UI that offers multiple options for you to design such a PDF base template.

PDF Template Builder

This designer provides multiple types to layout the template via drag & drop. It will give you an accurate view of the certificate that gets generated upon course completions.

Text

You can add texts, that will be "overwritten" with real and dynamic values upon certificate creation. To better differentiate "dynamic" texts like these and read-only ones, the dynamic ones have a blue outline around them.

While you can set a placeholder text to give you a better picture on how your certificate will look in the end, the values are substituted depending on the Name you gave the text element. A full list of the substitution possibilities will be given here:

Name	Info
courseCompletionDate	Date when the course was completed in the following format: May 23, 2024
courseName	The name of the course. Unit 1-01: Introduction to Problem Gambling
coursePointsCompletion	CE points given for the specific course. 1.0
fullName	First and lastname of the user who completed this course. Tonya Williams
licenseString	An automatically generated string based on the user's license in the following format: Licensed by: AGENCY License #NUMBER
licenseString2	An automatically generated string based on the user's second license in the following format: Licensed by: AGENCY2 License #NUMBER2

ReadOnly Text

It works similar as normal Texts, but these will NOT be overwritten or substituted and are static. What you see is what you will get on certificate creation.

Image

An image you can resize and drag around to your liking.

Line

A simple line you can configure and style via various options.

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Use your arrow keys to move around elements in 1px decrements or hold the Shift key as well to move it around in 0.1px decrements.

Course Categories

These are actual categories you can create and assign courses to. They have a component so you can render these on the Pages content-type.

Courses

You can create and modify courses here. Set a name, assign lessons / quizzes, set the access period, price and more!

Courses Availability

Availability will determine if a course is hidden or just not available for the users. There are 3 levels / priorities regarding this.

Levels

Settings can be found either on a specific course directly (first priority), in a specific User Course Group (third priority) or in Settings -> LMS -> Configuration -> Availability Settings for the fourth and fifth priority.

1. Within a specific course, there is an Available property. If this is unchecked, the course will be hidden and is also NOT available for all your users.
2. Within a specific course, there is a Roles property. Only these roles can access this specific course. If this select is empty all roles can access the course to this point, unless availability is denied in later levels.
3. In a User Course Group, you can overwrite availability of a specific or all courses as well. This takes precedence over role based availability settings of later levels.
4. In the Availability Settings, you are able to set course availability for a specific role. This takes precedence over the global switch for users with that specific role.
5. In the Availability Settings, you are able to globally mark courses as unavailable.

Properties

Managing course availability is done via two properties. Disable Coursesand Disable Until Date Label.

Disable Courses

This is a simple switch. If it is enabled, all courses will be unavailable, however, they will still be visible within the UI in an "unavailable" state.

Disable Until Date Label

This influences the label that is shown within the frontend. If this is not provided it would just show Unavailablewithin the frontend for every course. If you set a specific date, it will show the exact date when it becomes available again (see screenshot above).

WARNING

This option will NOT switch the Disabled Courses property automatically on that specific date. This is merely a display label functionality.

Summary

This will give you powerful ways to decide which of your users have access to the courses. For example: you could globally disable courses, but then create a role-specific exception so users with that specific role would still have access to courses. You could also hide specific courses entirely from the users.

Instructor

An instructor is someone who created a course, thus a course can be assigned to an instructor. This is important, since it is possible to filter by instructor in the course overview. You can also assign an instructor as user.

Lessons

Lessons can be assigned to courses and encapsulate a part of the course where users may need to watch a video to complete or can read information/materials.

Materials

Materials can be used in many situations. They are content blocks, that can be assigned to lessons to preface information to the user or in quizzes to forward information regarding it to the user.

Questions

Can be assigned to quizzes. Questions contain answers, where you can set which answer is the correct one.

WARNING

The question type multiple is currently not implemented.

Quizzes

Quizzes can be assigned to courses and encapsulate a part of the course where users need to pass a quiz or, depending on the type, can also be used for evaluations.

User Course

When a user enrolls into a course, a new User Course will be added for it to encapsulate information about it. You can also extend expired courses here and see lots of information about the completion state of lessons and quizzes.

User Course Credits

Here you can provide free credit hours for continuing education for users. One credit = 1 hour of continuing education or $10. Users may receive credits for a variety of reasons, including as benefits of CalPG programs.

A 1.5 hour class uses 1.5 credits. If a user is short on credits, i.e. they have 1 credit for a 1.5 hour class, it can be substituted with money. In this case, they would pay 1 credit and $5. This is displayed in the UI as well and the user can decide if they would like to pay the full amount with money or mixed.

If a user is both in a user course group with free classes, and has credits, the group takes precedence. If the group is discounted classes, the user has the option to either pay the discounted rate with money or credits. The credits will also be discounted at the same rate.

INFO

Users will receive an email once you award them credits. They also receive a reminder in case credits are about to expire in 2 weeks.

User Course Groups

User Course groups have various functionality to group users and courses.

You can assign users and courses to them to then grant either temporary or indefinite discounts. You can also provide the respective courses for free.

If a user is in multiple groups that also include the same course, the biggest discount will be taken automatically. Meaning, if the user is in one group where the discount is 50% for a specific course and another one has 70% discount for that course, the 70% discount will be chosen. These discounted prices will be shown to the user on the website as well.

If you set an expired date, the system will check every hour and if necessary will set that group to not active. Discounts of non-active groups will not apply. If you do not set an expired date, the group will be active indefinitely.

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You can also assign a course group on the user side directly.

User course groups can also be used to overwrite the availability of a specific course or all courses.

User Lesson

User Lessons are assigned to User Courses automatically. They contain information about the lesson's progress and save information like the video progression.

User Quiz

User Quizzes are assigned to user Courses automatically. Similar to User Lessons, they hold information about the status of the quiz's progress. You can also see and reset/remove quiz attempts here.