How do you identify the space a course is created in?

To determine which Confluence space a course resides in, there are several straightforward methods available:

1. Via the Global Catalog: the space name is prominently displayed on each course card. However, if you notice the absence of this feature, there’s a quick fix: Navigate to App Configuration > Catalog > Cards and activate the “Show space name” option. It’s also worth noting that when in list view within the global catalog, the space name is available in a dedicated column.
2. Through the Space Catalog: Simply head to the desired space and launch the Smart Courses app from the sidebar. You’ll be presented with a catalog specific to that space, listing all its courses.
3. Using the course Editor or player URL: Dive into the course editor or player and direct your attention to the browser’s address bar. At the end of the URL, you’ll identify a segment resembling “&ac.spaceKey=DM.”

Click the below carousel to discover more.

What can you expect after converting a course to an exam in Smart Courses?

While the process of turning a regular course into an exam is detailed in our previous blog post, it’s imperative to understand what happens after this transformation.

Once a course takes the form of an exam, attendees can be provided with a Pass/Fail status. An attendee gets the ‘Pass’ status only after they’ve completed the course and gone through each capsule. So, if you recall a Confluence user saying they didn’t get their Pass/Fail status, it might be because they left some course capsules unexplored. They’d have to jump back in and finish the course, but a quick note: once they’re in, they can’t modify their previous answers.

But when does one truly complete a regular course? Well, when their session progress hits a perfect 100%.

A gentle reminder: If session progress is under 100%, only the attendees are able to mark the exam as Finished to receive their exam status.

Attendees can achieve that by clicking on the “Finish the exam” button.

As they navigate their onboarding adventure, understanding the basic terminology and getting to know the team is essential to make the journey smoother for new hires.

What’s the difference between a Course and an Exam?

At first glance, courses and exams might seem like siblings in the Smart Courses family, but they each have distinct features, especially in the insights section.

A course centers on learning and is calculated by “Session Progress”, which measures how many capsules (or content sections) an attendee has explored. In contrast, an exam is all about testing knowledge. Its insights are determined by the percentage of correct answers in the associated quizzes. So, when you hear terms like “Average Score“, it’s referencing the quiz performance in an exam.

Additionally, the time limit feature is exclusive to the quiz capsule of the exam. Attendees are given a countdown, and if time runs out before they finish, their current responses are automatically submitted. This specificity is absent in regular courses.

When faced with tough choices, new employees will appreciate this quiz’s support as it offers a range of options, of which one or more can be the correct answer, making their transition seamless and enjoyable.

How to restore an old version of a course?

While creating the “Course history” feature, Smart Courses team made sure they followed the same logic as the Confluence page history feature. To revisit and restore older versions, just switch to “Version mode”, browse through the archived versions, and when you’ve pinpointed the one you need, simply hit “Restore”.

Keep in mind that it’s only the course content that gets revived, not the configurations.

How to configure and find assignment due dates in Smart Courses?

If you’ve been using Smart Courses for a while, you might remember how to set due dates from our earlier blog post. The due date determines the timeframe a user has to complete a course.

But what if you forget the due date? Or did that email reminder disappear in your overflowing inbox?

Here’s the twist: we noticed that our users wanted an easier way to see their due dates, as the only cue for assignment due dates was a notification email, which could sometimes get overlooked among other messages. This prompted us to rethink and redesign our user interface.

So, we’ve integrated the due date displays right within the Smart Courses app.

• Course Insights: Find the due date in front of every assigned user.
• Course Card (under Assigned): A quick glance reveals the due date.
• List View (under Assigned): A streamlined list with due dates section for each course.
• Normal User (with basic permissions) dashboard: Your central hub for all course activities, prominently displaying the upcoming due dates.

Wrap Up

And that wraps up Part 3 of our Smart Courses Q&A series! As always, keep those questions coming, and we’ll continue to provide the answers. 

Ordering question

This type of question requires learners to put elements, such as actions, events, or stages, in the correct order. It assesses the learner’s understanding of processes, procedures, or sequences.

You can further enhance the question by adding media to provide additional context.

Onboarding is a multi-step procedure that, when executed correctly, ensures a new hire’s smooth integration into the company, and this question is vital in ensuring that new hires understand the flow of onboarding from start to finish.

Matching question

As a fun, interactive way to build familiarity, you can use the matching question to introduce your recruits to terminologies, names to roles, titles to definitions, or even departments to their functions.

As they navigate their onboarding adventure, understanding the basic terminology and getting to know the team is essential to make the journey smoother for new hires.

Multiple choices question

Life’s full of choices, and so is a thriving workplace. The multiple-choice question is more than just a quiz. It fosters decision-making skills for new employees and encourages them to analyze options and select the most appropriate answers based on their understanding.

When faced with tough choices, new employees will appreciate this quiz’s support as it offers a range of options, of which one or more can be the correct answer, making their transition seamless and enjoyable.

Single choice question

Single-choice questions are your secret weapon!

Use them to measure the new hires’ understanding of essential concepts and to test their knowledge on a specific topic by providing multiple options but only one correct answer.

Employ the single-choice question to assess the newbies’ comprehension of the organization’s core values, company policies, and mission.

Fill in the blank question

Complete the MISSING WORDS! This is what this question is all about.

They need to piece the puzzle together without the aid of available choices.

Fill in the blank is a question format that challenges the learners’ direct recall and comprehension of specific details.

To ensure precision, Smart Courses offers the choice of enabling case sensitivity and diacritics sensitivity, providing them with additional control over their learning experience.

Screenshot of the options 

Freetext question

During onboarding, new hires should memorize essential core facts or principles. These facts usually require simple recall rather than contextual comprehension.

This type of question has 2 different views:

• The course creator view “course editor”: They need to type the accepted answers, whether it’s only one or more.
• The attendee view “course player”: remember the precise answer without any guiding options or hints and type it exactly as it is.

The Freetext question is particularly effective when you need to ensure that the attendee has a clear and precise understanding of specific facts or concepts.

Essay question

As part of onboarding, understanding a new hire’s viewpoint on key industry skills or any other work-related topic can be illuminating.

The essay question is your window into the minds of your new recruits.

A format that encourages in-depth responses, allowing participants to fully express their thoughts, perspectives, and opinions on a particular topic.

This question has a different format regarding score measuring in the insights. Smart Courses will not automatically detect whether the answer is correct or wrong until the course creator validates it manually.

Wrap up

And there we have it! A fresh, engaging, and effective way to onboard your newbies.

By blending interactive quizzes, you’ll create a welcoming and captivating onboarding & learning experience that sets new hires up for the next step.

Introducing the New Quiz Capsule (YouTube) Smart Courses for Confluence

Who can see created courses?

When it comes to permissions in Smart Courses, the cloud-based version differs from the server and data center setups. For on-premises, It gives you complete control, allowing you to decide who can use Smart Courses and who cannot, while in Cloud, every Confluence user automatically has permission to use Smart Courses. By that, everyone who has permission to view a certain space also has permission to view the courses residing within them.

But hold on, a question here pops up! Is there any specific use case where some specific courses remain hidden even if you have space view permission?

The short answer is yes! A use case where a course creator or a Confluence admin restricts you from viewing a specific course.

Curious to learn more about restrictions? Keep reading!

How can I restrict courses to specific groups or users?

Since we mentioned the restrictions use case, we come to the question, “How can I restrict courses to a specific group or user?

But before we answer that, the more important question most of the clients ask here is, “Are the restrictions inclusive or exclusive?

The answer is “Smart Courses operates on an exclusive basis.”

As mentioned in our documentation, only the mentioned groups and users will have the VIP pass to view the course and attend it.

Now, who can achieve this exclusive access?

Course admins, including creators and contributors, as well as Confluence admins, have the power to enable this feature within the course settings. With just a few effortless steps, you can curate a personalized learning experience for your selected audience.

What’s the best practice for organizing courses in a restricted learning center?

Imagine a Confluence space dedicated solely to learning, becoming like your own customized learning center where you put courses for all departments. But how can you achieve this seamless integration of courses while maintaining control over course creation permissions?

Let me provide you with some context first.

If you’ve read Part 1 of this Q&A, you will definitely remember that course creation permissions match the page creation permissions in a space on Cloud.

While creating courses in different spaces is suitable for scenarios where anyone with page creation permission can create courses, we understand that some organizations require more control over permissions.

So, let us guide you through the best practice here.

To optimize your Smart Courses experience, we recommend creating a dedicated Confluence space for training where only concerned admins have the course creation permissions (aka page creation permissions) while hiding the Smart Courses app from other spaces ensuring centralizing the learning experience in one place.

Now, you may be wondering how you can organize the variety of courses across various departments.

By assigning relevant Confluence labels and categories, you will classify and organize courses, ensuring a logical and intuitive structure. Users can by that easily navigate and find courses tailored to their specific department or area of interest.

Manual assignments can be time-consuming if the attendees’ list is long!

So, If you have a use case where you need to do bulk assignments for Confluence groups, this section is for you!

Picture this:

• You work in a large company where you welcome newbies/ new talents on a regular basis, per season, or whatever the timeframe. These new joiners need to complete a series of courses promptly as part of their onboarding period. But assigning 5 or more courses to these new joiners each time is not the best idea, right?

Well, this feature can save your time. The “continuous assignment” in Smart Courses. Simply add the Confluence group name, and let the magic unfold. Every time a new joiner becomes part of that group, the designated course will be automatically assigned to them.

You can also customize the due date before they even join the group, and the app will seamlessly start the countdown from the moment they officially become a member.

Contributors who have permission to access a course in edit mode are granted access to its valuable metrics. Specifically, if a user holds space admin privileges and the “add page” permission, they can dive into any course within that space and explore its metrics.

Additionally, these contributors can also access global metrics and space metrics, providing them with a comprehensive understanding of the overall performance of only the courses they are contributing to.

Wrap up

Wrapping up Part 2 of our Smart Courses Q&A series, we hope this helped you find a more defined image of the app.

Until next time, happy learning with Smart Courses!

Who has the right to create a course?

“On the Confluence cloud version of Smart Courses, permissions to create courses match the page creation permissions.” as mentioned in Smart Courses documentation.

By default, course creators/contributors can view the metrics of the courses they created even if they are not admins in Confluence or Smart Courses.

Do we support pre-built courses or course templates?

The short answer is that we don’t support pre-built courses in Smart Courses for Confluence. As part of the app strategy, we allow Confluence users to design courses while adding their own content, from Confluence pages, videos, and images, to embedding HTML and much more. We support 8+ content types in Smart Courses that enable you to create your own course templates.

Can Confluence users assign courses to themselves?

Confluence users who have basic permissions and are not course creators can’t assign courses to themselves. The course creators/contributors are the ones responsible for that.

Some use cases like auditing, for example, require the course creators and contributors to have sessions and track their learning journey, just like the Confluence users in their team. That’s feasible with Smart Courses if you enable the option “Allow contributors enrollment” from the course configuration.

Important info: The following steps must be followed precisely in order for the assignment to function properly.

1. Open course configuration
2. Choose “Enrollment”
3. Enable “Allow contributors enrollment“
4. Save the course
5. Assign the course to yourself

You will get an assignment email, and your name will appear in the course metrics with the tag “Assigned.”

If a user decides to switch to another tab while the minimum reading time is counting down, it should be frozen to ensure that the attendees spend that time on the capsule.

Wrap up

We will continue tackling a range of questions that are frequently asked by our clients each period of time.

If you have questions you want answers to, please do not hesitate to write them in the comments section of this blog post. 

Stay tuned for the upcoming Q&A blog post.

Smart Courses major feature releases

Smart Courses for Confluence witnessed outstanding changes in 2022 to the User Interface and the User Experience. Three levels in Smart Courses were targeted:

• Course Catalog
• Course editor
• Metrics

Here’s a briefing of all the important features that were added to each level.

Course Catalog

Regarding the catalog configuration, we expanded the opportunity of customizing brandings, announcements, and cards to the space level, so now you can have a customized catalog per space or globally. We also made it possible to hide and reorder the catalog filtering options per space and globally.

One more thing that became common between spaces catalogs and the global catalog is displaying the total number of courses next to the filtering options.

Last but not least, a space indication of the course was added to the course card.

Course editor

Here’s the list:

• Built a course dashboard that you can access during or at the end of the course while previewing or attending the course.
• Customization of the certificate template per course, per space, and global.
• Add and edit course levels from the global configuration.
• Added a few more options to the course configuration and enhanced the latter to be organized.
• Revamped the assignment feature user interface
• The mention of the assignment due date in the email sent to the attendee
• Customization of assignment reminders:
  • No. of days before the due date to start sending reminders
  • How often will reminders be sent
  • Customize the assignment messages with HTML
• Brought a feature to allow the enrollment of users even if the assignment is overdue.
• Tables became supported within text capsules.
• Added a configuration section in the text capsule.

Metrics

Regarding the metrics, the user dashboard was rebuilt to provide more activity reporting and metrics of every Confluence user in Smart Courses.

Another enhancement that was required by our clients was to add the list of course contributors to the course metrics. Speaking of course contributors, they obtained the rights to export copies of generated certificates to users from the course metrics.

Smart Terms major feature releases

Moving on to your favorite glossary app for Confluence, Smart Terms.

A complete user interface and user experience build-up have emerged.

• Glossary: 3 new layouts for glossary display.
• Redesigned the instant search box, the filtering, and the letter navigation search.
• Organized Smart Terms highlight engine configuration and added a few options.
• Modernized the term editor introducing adding media while dragging and dropping easily between them. Added the highlight globally option to the term editor.
• Built the term history option.
• Introduced the multi-language support to the term.
• Terms list macro is supported for Cloud.

The last release for Smart Terms targeted 5 major key points:

1. Glossary branding
2. Disabling the highlight per page and per user
3. The support of tables added to the term editor
4. The related vocabulary section now supports plurals
5. Filtering options are joined: Filter by Contributors, related vocabulary, spaces, and term titles.

You can see further explanations of each feature from the video below: