What happens to everything we’ve already built?

Your courses, assignments, learner data, Insights, and the workflows your teams already rely on all had to remain part of the experience.

The migration took several months of work, with one priority throughout: bring Smart Courses to Forge while preserving the features and workflows you are already familiar with.

But we didn’t stop at rebuilding what was already there.

Along the way, we also introduced improvements and new capabilities to make training easier to assign, track, and manage.

Smart Courses is now built on Atlassian Forge, with new capabilities to assign Learning Paths, understand learner status, and customize the information you see across course listings and Insights.

Let’s go through what’s new in this Cloud version of Smart Courses LMS.

Smart Courses is now on Atlassian Forge

Smart Courses for Confluence is now built on Atlassian Forge.

For most users, this change happens behind the scenes. The Smart Courses experience remains familiar, but the app is now built on the platform Atlassian is using for the future of its cloud ecosystem.

Why does this matter?

Moving to Forge keeps Smart Courses closely aligned with Atlassian’s platform and gives us a stronger foundation for future development.

As Confluence and the wider Atlassian ecosystem continue to evolve, Smart Courses can evolve alongside them, giving us more opportunities to introduce deeper integrations and new capabilities over time.

Most importantly, the move to Forge was designed around continuity. You can continue working with the training content and workflows you already know while benefiting from a version of Smart Courses built for Atlassian’s latest cloud platform.

Assign Learning Paths

Learning Paths already let you combine up to 10 courses and exams into one structured learning journey.

Now, you can assign an entire Learning Path to Confluence users and groups.

Instead of managing training course by course, you can assign the complete journey learners are expected to follow.

This can be especially useful for structured programs such as employee onboarding, compliance training, role-based training, or professional development.

Why did we add it?

This was actually one of the first feature requests we received after launching Learning Paths.

Creating a Learning Path makes it easier to organize related training, but customers also needed a simple way to assign that complete path to learners.

Now, instead of assigning each course separately or asking learners to find the right Learning Path themselves, you can assign the full path from the start.

See learner status directly in Course Insights

Course Insights help you understand how learners are progressing.

This release makes that information easier to scan by adding learner status directly to Course Insights.

You can now quickly see where each learner stands without relying only on progress percentages, completion dates, or other indicators.

Why does this matter?

Checking individual learner progress may be manageable with a small group. As the number of learners grows, it becomes much harder.

Having a clear status directly in the Course Insights makes it easier to identify who has completed their training, who is still progressing, and who may require follow-up.

Instead of interpreting several pieces of data, you get a faster overview of where everyone stands.

Customize your lists

Not every team needs to see the same information.

An HR manager tracking onboarding may care about different data than someone managing compliance training, internal certification, or another training program.

You can now choose which columns to display and then drag and drop them into the order that works for you.

Column customization is available in both the course catalog Listing view and Insights dashboards.

Why did we add it?

As more information becomes available in Smart Courses, listings and Insights can quickly include columns that are useful for one workflow but less relevant to another.

Now, you can adapt the view to what you are working on.

Keep the information you use most visible, hide columns you don’t need, and drag and drop columns to arrange them in the order that makes the most sense for your team.

External Links

There is one more change to be aware of if your courses use externally hosted content.

With the new Forge version, media, embedded websites, and SCORM content that load resources from external domains are subject to Forge egress controls.

In simple terms, Smart Courses can load content only from approved external domains.

We’ve already included some of the external links commonly used by Smart Courses customers, so media components using these services can continue to work without additional configuration:

• Google Drive
• SharePoint
• YouTube
• Loom
• Vimeo

If your media (video or audio) comes from one of these supported sources, you usually don’t need to do anything.

What if your content comes from another website?

You have two options, depending on the type of content you are using.

Option 1: Upload the file as an attachment

For media such as images, videos, or audio files, you can export the file and upload it directly to Smart Courses as an attachment.

Option 2: Add the external domain in Smart Courses configuration

If the content must remain externally hosted, a Smart Courses admin or Confluence admin with site administration permissions can add the required domain in the Smart Courses global configuration.

Once the domain is added, Smart Courses can load supported content from that external source directly inside the course.

This applies to externally hosted:

• Video and audio components
• HTML and web page components
• SCORM packages that load content or resources from external links

More improvements in this release

Alongside the bigger updates, we’ve made a few more improvements to Smart Courses:

• Cleaner filters: A new filter UI in both the course catalog and Insights keeps the interface less cluttered while making it easier to find what you need.
• Easy access to copied courses: When you copy a course, you can now retrieve the link to the new course directly from the confirmation modal.
• Refreshed design: Smart Courses has been updated to better align with Atlassian’s latest design system, creating a more consistent experience across Confluence.

Try Smart Courses for Confluence free

Confluence provides a central place for HR policy documentation, while Marketplace apps can add approval workflows, terminology management, and employee training.

Effective policy management goes beyond storing documents. It creates a clear process for keeping policies accurate, approved, accessible, understood, and up to date.

What is policy management in Confluence?

Policy management in Confluence is the process of creating, organizing, reviewing, approving, publishing, and maintaining company policies in one central environment.

An HR policy hub might contain an employee handbook, code of conduct, remote work and leave policies, security and data protection policies, benefits documentation, expense policies, and compliance procedures.

The difference between simply storing policies and managing them is control. HR teams should be able to identify a policy’s current version, owner, approver, and review schedule.

A clear process turns a collection of Confluence pages into a reliable policy management system.

Why HR policies become difficult to manage

As organizations grow, policies can become scattered across different tools, outdated, or difficult to track. Employees may not know which version is current, while ownership, review dates, and approvals become harder to follow.

Without a clear process, policies can remain outdated or be approved without a reliable record. A structured policy management process helps keep them current, accountable, and easier to manage.

How to manage HR policies in Confluence

A scalable system does not need to be complicated. It needs a clear structure, visible ownership, and a repeatable lifecycle.

Create a central HR Policy Center

Start by giving employees one place for official policies.

Organize policies into clear categories such as Employee Policies, Security & Compliance, Benefits, and Training.

The goal is simple: employees should know where to find the latest approved information without searching across multiple spaces, files, or tools.

Use a consistent policy template

A standard structure makes policies easier to create and maintain.

Each policy can include essential information such as the policy owner, status, effective date, last review date, next review date, scope, responsibilities, and related documentation.

Using the same structure across policies also makes missing or outdated information easier to spot.

Assign clear ownership

Every important policy should have someone responsible for maintaining it.

Review frequency will vary by policy, but ownership should always be clear.

Define the policy lifecycle

Policies should not follow a simple:

Create → Publish → Forget

A more reliable process is:

This gives HR teams a repeatable process for managing policies throughout their lifecycle rather than reacting only when something becomes outdated.

Add approvals to your Confluence policy workflow

Some policies require formal review before they become official.

A data protection policy, for example, may need input from HR, Legal, IT, or senior management.

Confluence provides the documentation foundation, while Marketplace apps can add structured approval workflows, approval status tracking, decision history, and audit trails.

The process could look like this:

HR drafts the policy → Legal reviews it → Management approves it → The approved version is published → Employees access the current policy

This creates a clearer record of how a policy moved from draft to approved documentation and reduces uncertainty around which version employees should follow.

Make HR policies easier to understand

Making a policy available does not automatically make it easy to understand.

HR documentation often includes abbreviations, legal terminology, technical language, and company-specific concepts that may not be clear to every employee.

With Smart Terms for Confluence, HR teams can build a shared glossary directly inside Confluence and make definitions available in context as employees read policies.

A glossary could include terms such as PTO, PII, EAP, probation period, confidential information, or internal role classifications. Teams can also add related vocabulary, including acronyms, synonyms, and plurals, to keep terminology consistent across policies.

For organizations working across regions, Smart Terms supports multilingual glossaries, allowing teams to maintain terms and definitions in multiple languages.

Teams can also use Lexi, the Glossary AI assistant in Smart Terms, to scan Confluence content or uploaded documents and identify terminology worth defining. Lexi can draft definitions based on the surrounding content and translate suggested terms into enabled glossary languages.

Instead of asking employees to search elsewhere for an unfamiliar term, HR teams can add explanations directly in the policy while keeping one shared source for key company terminology.

Connect HR policies with employee training

Some policies need more than publication. Employees may need to understand the content, complete required training, and demonstrate that they know what is expected.

This is especially important for onboarding, information security, workplace conduct, data protection, and compliance.

With Smart Courses for Confluence, HR teams can turn policy documentation into structured learning without moving employees to a separate LMS.

For example, a new-hire learning path could combine courses on the Code of Conduct, Information Security, Data Protection, Remote Work, and Workplace Safety. Learning Paths can group related courses and exams into a defined training journey, while prerequisites and skills can control what employees need to complete or demonstrate before progressing.

HR teams can add quizzes and exams to check understanding, assign training with due dates, and issue certificates when required learning is completed. Course insights also help HR teams track progress and completion, rather than assuming that opening a policy means it was understood.

For recurring compliance requirements, courses can be scheduled to repeat so employees revisit required training when necessary.

The process becomes:

Policy published → Training assigned → Learning completed → Knowledge checked → Completion or certification tracked

By connecting policies with structured learning, HR teams can move beyond simply publishing information and create a clearer way to support onboarding, compliance, and ongoing employee training directly in Confluence.

Turn policy updates into employee learning

The connection between policies and training becomes especially important when a policy changes.

If your company updates its data protection policy, publishing the new version may not be enough. The change may also require approval, employee communication, updated training, and a knowledge check.

Update policy → Review and approve → Publish → Notify employees → Update training → Check understanding

This connects policy updates directly to employee learning instead of assuming employees will notice and understand a changed page.

The compliance content stays specialized. The learning experience lives in Confluence.

Try Smart Courses for Confluence free for 30 days.

Most organizations solve the first problem with specialized compliance courseware. But for teams already working in Confluence, training can still sit in a separate system from the policies, procedures, and documentation employees use every day.

Smart Courses lets you bring compatible, appropriately licensed BAI/ProSight compliance courseware into Confluence through SCORM, connecting specialized training with the workspace employees already use.

What is BAI compliance training?

BAI compliance training is now offered under the ProSight brand. BAI and the Risk Management Association (RMA) merged in 2024 to form ProSight Financial Association.

ProSight provides compliance courseware designed specifically for banks, credit unions, mortgage organizations, and other financial institutions.

Its training covers areas such as BSA and anti-money laundering, UDAAP, GLBA, cybersecurity, identity theft, lending regulations, deposit and transaction regulations, and corporate compliance.

Courses are built around financial-services roles and can include practical scenarios, interactive activities, and assessments. That specialized content is one reason organizations may prefer licensing established compliance training instead of recreating regulatory courses internally.

The challenge is not only the content

Good courseware solves the content problem. Employees still need an easy way to access and complete it.

For teams working across the Atlassian ecosystem, much of the supporting knowledge may already live in Confluence: internal policies, security procedures, risk-management documentation, department resources, and compliance guidance.

Putting training closer to that knowledge creates a clearer connection between the policy employees are expected to follow and the training they need to complete.

Instead of reading a policy in Confluence and then searching for the related course in another system, employees can access both from the same workspace.

Can BAI/ProSight courses run in another LMS?

Yes. ProSight licenses its programs for use in other learning management systems through its Content Provider Service, subject to the applicable agreement and approved LMS configuration.

Through its Content Provider Service, ProSight can provide licensed programs for use through a client’s approved learning management system.

An important distinction exists between ProSight/BAI-owned courseware and custom content your organization creates.

• ProSight/BAI courseware: You cannot assume you can freely export, copy, or reuse licensed ProSight/BAI training in another LMS. Whether you can deliver a course through an external LMS depends on your licensing agreement with ProSight and the delivery options they provide. Confirm the applicable permissions and SCORM availability with ProSight before requesting or importing course files.
• Custom content created by your organization: If you create and design your own training content within the platform, that content is separate from ProSight’s proprietary course catalog. Where the platform provides SCORM export for that custom content, you can export the resulting SCORM package and use it in a compatible LMS, subject to your organization’s rights to the content and the platform’s applicable terms.

In other words, licensed ProSight courseware and your own custom-created training should not be treated as having the same export rights.

Before planning the integration, confirm with ProSight that your agreement supports external-LMS delivery and that the course is available in a format compatible with SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004.

Once you have a compatible SCORM package that you are authorized to use in your LMS, Smart Courses can deliver it inside Confluence.

From ProSight courseware to training in Confluence

Start by selecting the ProSight courses that match your regulatory requirements and employee roles. Training for frontline employees, mortgage teams, managers, or compliance officers may differ, so match the right courseware to the right audience.

Once you select the courses, confirm with ProSight that your license and delivery arrangement support external-LMS use, and request the compatible course files or delivery method available for your account.

In Smart Courses, create a new course, enable the SCORM course option, open the course editor, and upload the compatible SCORM ZIP package you are authorized to use and have obtained through your ProSight licensing or delivery arrangement.

Smart Courses supports both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004, so you can import compatible courseware without recreating the original training as Confluence pages.

Once published, you can assign the course to individual users or Confluence groups with a due date.

For recurring compliance requirements, group-based assignment can also help automate enrollment as employees join the relevant groups.

Administrators can then use Course Insights to follow learner progress, completion status, scores, and due dates.

Connect compliance training with your Confluence policies

This is where the combination becomes particularly useful.

Smart Courses provides a Course Card macro that can surface an individual published course on a Confluence page. The Course List macro can display a filtered collection of courses based on criteria such as categories, labels, or spaces.

Imagine an employee opening a Mandatory Banking Compliance Training page in Confluence.

At the top, the compliance team explains the program and provides links to internal policies. Below that, employees can find the relevant BSA/AML, cybersecurity, lending, identity-theft, or transaction-compliance courses available through Smart Courses.

The same page can also contain training deadlines, instructions, and contact information for the compliance team.

Employees move from policy → context → training without having to search across disconnected systems.

Who handles what?

A practical example

Consider a bank already managing its policies and procedures in Confluence.

The compliance team creates a Mandatory Banking Compliance Training page containing its internal compliance guidance and links to the policies employees are expected to understand.

Courses licensed from ProSight are imported into Smart Courses as SCORM packages and assigned by employee role.

Branch employees may receive BSA/AML and identity-theft training, while mortgage teams receive the lending-related courses relevant to their responsibilities.

Course cards and filtered course lists make that training accessible from the compliance area employees already use.

Meanwhile, the compliance team can use Insights to monitor who has completed the required training and where follow-up is still needed.

The result is a closer connection between what employees are expected to know and the training they are expected to complete.

What does Smart Courses track from SCORM?

Smart Courses captures the completion and score information sent by the SCORM package.

For SCORM 1.2, that includes lesson status and raw score. For SCORM 2004, Smart Courses uses completion status, success status, and raw score.

This allows learner results such as completed, incomplete, passed, or failed to appear in Smart Courses depending on the information provided by the package.

One limitation to keep in mind: Smart Courses does not currently capture individual question-level results from an imported SCORM course. It reports the package’s overall status and score.

Therefore, we recommend testing a new SCORM package before assigning it organization-wide to ensure its completion and scoring rules are reported as expected.

You can also enable certificates for SCORM courses when completion requirements are met.

Bring financial compliance training into Confluence

Compliance training works better when employees can easily find it alongside the policies and procedures it supports.

Once you have a compatible SCORM package that your ProSight licensing and delivery arrangement permits you to use in an LMS, upload it to Smart Courses, assign it to the right employees, and make it accessible from the Confluence pages your teams already use.

The compliance content stays specialized. The learning experience lives in Confluence.

Try Smart Courses for Confluence free for 30 days.

This is the reality for most growing teams, and it’s usually handled with a mix of onboarding docs, Slack messages, and a manager’s best guess about when someone is “ready.” That approach breaks down because knowledge and workload live in two systems that don’t talk to each other: a wiki page doesn’t know how loaded someone’s sprint is, and a sprint board has no idea whether they’ve finished security training yet.

Why do most onboarding programs fall short?

Three failure patterns show up again and again in growing teams:

• Readiness gets measured in time, not knowledge. Three weeks in is treated as a milestone regardless of whether someone has absorbed what they actually need to know.
• Training and delivery are treated as separate phases. Once someone touches their first ticket, onboarding is considered “done,” even if half the learning material is unfinished.
• Capacity is managed informally. “We’ll ease them in” rarely gets written down anywhere a manager or teammate can see it, so it doesn’t survive contact with a real sprint.

Fixing this doesn’t mean replacing Confluence or Jira; it means connecting the tools you already use so learning progress and workload planning inform each other in real time.

Structuring the Learning Path with Smart Courses for Confluence

The first half of a scalable onboarding system is making sure every new hire follows a consistent Learning path, not a scattered mix of pages and informal handovers.

With Smart Courses for Confluence, HR and team leads build a dedicated onboarding Learning Path that sequences everything a new hire needs into the right order: company policy, security training, product knowledge, engineering standards, and role-specific material. Learning Paths let you group multiple courses into a complete program, so a developer, a customer success manager, and a project manager can each follow a tailored track while still sharing common company-wide training.

A few things make this especially effective for onboarding at scale:

Courses can combine Confluence pages, PDFs, images, videos, and even HTML or SCORM packages so whatever format your documentation already lives in, it can become part of the learning journey without being rebuilt from scratch. Since Confluence pages stay connected, any updates your team makes are automatically reflected inside the course, so nobody is ever learning from an outdated version.

Assign courses directly, with due dates. Managers can assign individual courses to specific users or groups, complete with due dates and automatic notifications. This makes it easy to deliver mandatory training exactly when it’s needed: security training before a first login, product knowledge before someone joins their first customer call, instead of hoping people find it on their own.

Skills and quizzes turn learning into evidence. Interactive quizzes at the end of each chapter or course confirm a new hire actually understood the material, not just clicked through it. Combined with prerequisites and skills, onboarding becomes competency-based rather than time-based. Teams may require specific knowledge or a completed quiz to unlock the next stage, so nobody advances on assumption alone.

Insights give managers a real-time view. Built-in insights dashboards show course completion, quiz results, and overall learner progress across every new hire at once. Instead of chasing status updates in a 1:1, a manager can see exactly where each person stands and catch gaps before those gaps affect day-to-day work.

By turning existing Confluence knowledge into structured, trackable training, Smart Courses answers the first key onboarding question: what does this person actually know, and are they ready for the next step?

Managing real workload with ActivityTimeline for Jira

Knowing what someone has learned only solves half the problem. The other half is knowing how much real work they can actually take on right now, and that’s a question learning tools alone can’t answer.

This is where ActivityTimeline for Jira comes in. It’s a resource and capacity-planning app built directly on top of your existing Jira projects, giving everyone, including new hires, a personal timeline showing what’s assigned to them, along with a workload indicator that reflects how loaded they are relative to their real capacity.

A few features make it particularly useful for managing new team members:

See real workload distribution. The workload indicator, color-coded from light green to red, is calculated from both Jira estimates and custom events such as bookings or training blocks. For a new hire, this means a manager can see at a glance whether an “easy onboarding ticket” is actually filling their whole week or leaving them mostly idle, rather than finding out during a retro two sprints later.

Control allocation for new hires. Rather than assigning tasks the same way you would for a tenured engineer, ActivityTimeline lets you set individual involvement (capacity) per person, for example, configuring a new hire at 4–5 hours/day of plannable work for their first two weeks. Booking events lets you reserve time for shadowing, pairing, or training sessions without needing a Jira ticket for each one, so that time shows up on the timeline and counts against capacity instead of disappearing into an invisible gap.

Avoid overloading during ramp-up. Because the workload indicator accounts for vacations, partial days, and custom involvement schedules, it’s much harder to accidentally schedule a new hire for more than they can handle. If a manager tries to stack tickets onto someone whose involvement is intentionally set to a lower level, the indicator visibly tips into yellow or red before the team finds out the hard way.

The result is planning grounded in actual capacity rather than assumptions. A manager isn’t asking “do I think this person is ready”; they’re looking at a timeline that already reflects training time, partial involvement, and current workload, and making a scheduling decision from there.

Bringing both systems together

Handing someone their first real piece of work comes down to two questions: has the relevant part of their learning path actually been completed, and does the timeline show they have the capacity for it right now? Smart Courses answers the first. ActivityTimeline answers the second. Put together, a manager isn’t guessing anymore; they’re looking at evidence of both readiness and availability before making the call.

Customer Success Manager onboarding

The same model works just as well outside engineering teams. Imagine a company hiring five new Customer Success Managers ahead of a major product launch.

Each new hire is enrolled in a Smart Courses LMS Learning Path that covers product knowledge, support workflows, communication guidelines, and internal tools, with quizzes to verify their understanding before they start working directly with customers. Managers track progress through the insights dashboard, just as an engineering manager would.

At the same time, ActivityTimeline helps team leads reserve time for product shadowing, customer call observations, and coaching sessions by reducing each new hire’s available capacity during their first weeks. As training milestones are completed, managers gradually increase their workload so new Customer Success Managers gain confidence without becoming overwhelmed.

Whether you’re onboarding developers or customer-facing teams, combining structured learning with capacity planning creates a repeatable onboarding process that scales as your organization grows.

Try Smart Courses for Confluence free for 30 days.

Try ActivityTimeline for Jira free for 30 days.

Workday manages employee records, approvals, and HR workflows. OnRamp orchestrates onboarding processes across teams and systems. Jira keeps onboarding tasks organized and moving. Together, they replace spreadsheets, scattered Slack messages, and forgotten follow-ups with a structured process.

But there is a problem many teams eventually run into.

A new hire can complete every onboarding task, receive every account, attend every scheduled meeting, and still not actually be ready to do the job.
That is because onboarding logistics and onboarding learning are two completely different things. You can process an employee without properly preparing them.

Where operational onboarding ends

Most modern organizations already rely on a stack of tools to manage onboarding at scale.
Workday handles employee records, approvals, and HR workflows.
OnRamp coordinates onboarding journeys across teams and systems.
Jira tracks tasks, tickets, and operational execution.
Together, they remove the chaos of manual onboarding, replacing spreadsheets, Slack threads, and ad-hoc coordination with structured, automated workflows.

But even when all of this works perfectly, a gap still remains.
A new hire can complete every onboarding task, receive every account, attend every scheduled meeting, and still not actually be ready to do the job.
That is because operational onboarding and learning onboarding solve two fundamentally different problems.

Operational Onboarding vs Learning Onboarding

Operational Onboarding:

These systems measure whether onboarding tasks happened.
A completed Jira ticket confirms that access was granted.
A completed HR workflow confirms that approvals were processed.
But neither confirms whether the employee is actually ready to perform their role effectively.

Operational onboarding is about execution:

• Accounts created
• Access granted
• Equipment delivered
• Workflows completed

It ensures the employee can enter the system.
But it does not ensure they can perform inside it.
Learning onboarding fills the gap left by operational systems.
Most organizations already have onboarding knowledge documented inside Confluence. The problem is structure.
New hires are often handed dozens of pages without knowing:

• Where to begin
• What matters most
• How information connects

So instead of learning a role, they end up having to navigate documentation.

Operational onboarding creates access.
Learning onboarding creates understanding.
Operational onboarding answers: “Are they set up?”
Learning onboarding answers: “Are they ready?”

Smart Courses for Confluence: turning documentation into learning

Smart Courses for Confluence transforms Confluence from a documentation platform into a structured learning environment built around the knowledge your team already maintains there, not a separate LMS you have to migrate content into.

That distinction matters.

In most organizations, onboarding knowledge evolves constantly alongside the business. Smart Courses keeps the learning experience connected to the same Confluence environment employees will use long after onboarding ends.

Instead of navigating isolated wiki pages on their own, new hires progress through a well-organized catalog with course cards and structured learning paths with clear progression and measurable outcomes.

Assign courses: New hires are automatically enrolled based on their group, so learning starts on day one without anyone needing to set it up manually. Once they join the group, they will receive a notification to take the course.

Exams and quizzes: comprehension gets verified at each stage, which matters most for compliance, security, and product knowledge, where misunderstanding has real consequences

Certifications: employees earn a record of what they have completed, and managers can see who is genuinely ready, not just who has finished the tasks

Learning paths: onboarding is organized into a guided progression so new hires move through knowledge in the right order, from foundational concepts to role-specific expertise, instead of navigating pages on their own

Skills and prerequisites: courses can require specific knowledge or completed modules before unlocking the next stage, ensuring no one skips steps they are not ready for.

How Workday, OnRamp, Jira, and Smart Courses work together

These tools complement each other so effectively because each solves a different onboarding problem.

Workday manages the employee record and HR workflows

OnRamp orchestrates onboarding journeys and cross-team coordination

Jira manages operational execution and task tracking

Smart Courses manages the learning layer that transforms documentation into structured onboarding and measurable capability development

A new employee can be created in Workday, automatically enrolled in onboarding workflows through OnRamp, assigned operational tasks in Jira, and guided through structured learning paths in Confluence via Smart Courses.

Operational onboarding and learning onboarding become connected rather than isolated from each other.

The Use Case: Onboarding a senior backend engineer

Move the engineer from “signed contract” to “shipping their first line of code” in 10 days, while ensuring they understand security protocols and system architecture along the way.

Phase 0: Workday the HR trigger

Everything starts in Workday.

Once HR marks the candidate as “Hired,” the employee record is created and synchronized across systems. Role, department, and onboarding metadata are now available to the rest of the stack.

This is what officially triggers the onboarding process.

Phase 1: OnRamp the orchestration layer

From that moment, OnRamp takes over coordination.

It connects HR, IT, and engineering teams into a single onboarding flow:

IT is notified to prepare provisioning
HR receives compliance tasks
Managers get onboarding checklists
The new hire receives timelines and communication
Jira onboarding projects are automatically prepared

At this point, onboarding is no longer manual it is orchestrated across systems.

Phase 2: Jira, the operational execution layer

Next comes execution.
A Jira onboarding project is automatically created and populated with tasks across teams.
IT provisions a MacBook Pro, GitHub access, and AWS permissions.
Managers are reminded to schedule onboarding sessions and introductions.
Security teams handle access reviews and compliance approvals.
Everything that needs to be physically and operationally set up is now tracked and completed.
But even when everything is marked as done, a gap remains.
Jira confirms the engineer is equipped not that they are ready.
They may have the laptop, the access, and the tickets completed… but still not understand deployment safety standards or backend architecture principles.

Phase 3: Smart Courses for Confluence, the learning layer

This is where onboarding shifts from execution to understanding.
Instead of navigating a long list of Confluence pages, the engineer enters a structured learning path built directly from the company’s existing documentation.
They are guided step by step through the knowledge they actually need to perform the role.
At the end of the “Security Standards” module, they complete a short quiz to validate understanding.

Once completed, Smart Courses generates a certification:

“Learning Path Complete: Security Certified.”

In Confluence, training materials often end up scattered across pages, inconsistently formatted, and difficult to navigate. As content grows, users lose visibility, and administrators lose control over structure and consistency.

Smart Courses for Confluence solves this by turning Confluence into a structured training system where teams can build a fully customized learning catalog, define clear Learning Paths, and control how content is discovered, filtered, and consumed.

Building a structured training system

The main shift Smart Courses introduces is moving from unstructured documentation to a designed learning environment.

Instead of isolated pages, training content is organized into structured learning elements, including courses, exams, Learning Paths, and a centralized catalog. This allows organizations to design training intentionally, ensuring consistency across teams while maintaining flexibility to accommodate different learning needs.

As a result, training becomes easier to manage, easier to scale, and significantly easier for users to follow, since content is no longer fragmented but part of a clear learning journey.

Building a customized training catalog

One of the most important aspects of delivering a strong training experience is customization.

Smart Courses allows teams to customize its catalog views based on their specific needs. The catalog can be adapted to reflect internal structures, training priorities, and audience segmentation.

This flexibility is essential when thinking about how to build a learning system in Confluence that scales across teams and departments.

Filters

Discoverability is where most training systems fail and where Smart Courses delivers the most impact.

The catalog includes a powerful filtering system that allows learners to find content quickly based on:

• Type (courses, exams, Learning Paths)
• Category
• Difficulty
• Language
• Status (assigned, ongoing, done, and favorites)

These filters transform the catalog into a dynamic discovery tool. Instead of searching manually, learners can navigate training logically and efficiently.

This directly addresses the core issue: making training content not just available, but easy to find.

Beyond structure: customizing the training experience

Customization in Smart Courses for Confluence goes beyond organizing content; it defines how training is experienced.

Teams can brand the catalog with logos and titles, and add announcement messages (info, note, or warning) to guide users directly within the interface. This transforms the catalog from a simple page into a dedicated training environment.

Administrators can also control how content is prioritized by setting default sorting and featuring up to 20 courses, ensuring the most important training is immediately visible.

On the visual side, course cards can be customized to show or hide specific information, while layout settings such as thumbnail size and scaling keep the catalog clean and consistent.

At the same time, categories and difficulty levels bring structure to the experience. Categories can be created without limitation, allowing teams to organize content by topic, department, or training objective. Difficulty levels, defined up to ten levels, introduce a clear sense of progression by indicating course complexity.

Together, these capabilities turn the catalog into a structured, branded, and fully controlled training experience, not just a list of content.

Improving discovery, structure, and learning experience with ecosystem tools

Beyond Smart Courses itself, the training experience becomes more powerful when supported by complementary tools that enhance the Confluence environment.

Rovo AI by Atlassian improves content discovery by helping users surface relevant training materials and documentation through intelligent search and contextual recommendations across Confluence and connected apps. Instead of relying solely on manual navigation, users can ask natural queries and quickly find useful knowledge across their organization.

Refined sites by Refined transforms Confluence into a fully branded training portal by improving navigation, layout, and overall user experience. This creates an environment that feels like a purpose-built training platform rather than a traditional documentation space, which increases engagement and usability.

On the content-structure side, scroll content manager by K15t helps teams manage training documentation in a scalable, consistent way. It ensures that content remains properly structured, version-controlled, and easy to maintain as training programs evolve.

To reinforce consistency, Synced Blocks Macro for Confluence allows teams to reuse content across multiple training pages while keeping it synchronized.

For presentation and usability, Aura Content Formatting  Aura Apps (Seibert – appanvil) improves the visual structure of training content by introducing layout components that enhance readability and reduce cognitive load, making learning materials easier to consume.

Finally, Composition Tabs by Appfire for Confluence helps organize complex content into structured sections using tabs, allowing learners to navigate information more easily without being overwhelmed.

Together, these tools enhance the broader Confluence environment in which Smart Courses operates, improving discovery, structure, consistency, and usability around the training experience.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce Learning Paths, a powerful new feature in Smart Courses for Confluence that helps organizations design structured learning journeys directly inside their Confluence LMS.

With Learning Paths, training administrators can guide learners step by step, improve training effectiveness, and significantly increase employee training completion rates.

What are Learning Paths in Smart Courses for Confluence?

Learning Paths let you group up to 10 courses or exams into a single, cohesive learning journey.
You can mix training courses and exams in any order or even build a path made entirely of exams. Instead of learners choosing what to take next, you define the sequence to ensure the right knowledge is delivered.

Each Learning Path is created within a specific Confluence space and follows that space’s permissions, making it ideal for new hire onboarding and department-specific training programs.

Key benefits include:

• Structured Learning Paths with clear course sequencing
• Centralized training content inside Confluence
• Improved learner engagement and progress tracking
• Higher training completion and accountability

Why Learning Paths matter for onboarding, compliance, and employee development

Disconnected courses often lead to confusion, low engagement, and incomplete training. Learning Paths solve this by turning individual courses into guided learning journeys.

Perfect for common training use cases:

• New hire onboarding programs
• Workplace compliance training
• Employee development and upskilling
• Corporate training and L&D initiatives

By combining self-paced learning with structured progression, organizations can create more effective learning and development (L&D) experiences.

A closer look at the Learning Path editor

Learning Path editor

The Learning Path editor is where paths come to life. After naming your path and selecting a Confluence space, you can add up to ten courses. Courses can be reordered with drag-and-drop, added or removed at any time, and visually enhanced with thumbnails to clearly communicate the learning flow.

Learning Path configuration

Configuration settings let you control how Learning Paths are maintained over time. You can manage contributors, add linear progression, define a short description, and set categories, labels, and difficulty level.
These controls ensure Learning Paths remain easy to manage, scalable, and aligned with your training goals.

Learning Path landing page

The Learning Path landing page brings multiple courses together into one guided experience. Learners see the full journey up front, including the order, overall progress, completion status, a brief description of the Learning Path’s difficulty level, and lables.

Learning Path insights

Learning Path insights focus on how learners progress through the path as a whole. Instead of reviewing individual course performance, you get a consolidated view of enrollment and completion across the entire journey either by courses or by learners.

How to get started with Learning Paths and courses in Smart Courses

Ready to transform your employee training from scattered content into a structured learning experience? Here’s how to get started with Learning Paths and Courses in Smart Courses for Confluence.

Step 1: Audit your existing training content

Start by reviewing all your employee training courses already stored in Confluence. Identify:

• Which content works best as standalone courses
• Which courses naturally belong together in a learning path

Ask key questions:

• What should new hires learn first in their onboarding experience?
• Which courses act as prerequisites for advanced training?

This audit lays the foundation for learning paths and effective course sequencing.

Step 2: Choose one high-impact training use case

Don’t try to structure everything at once in your Confluence LMS. Start with one critical use case, such as:

• New hire onboarding
• Compliance training
• Core role-based employee training

Decide whether you need:

• A Learning Path (up to 10 courses) for a guided learning journey, or
• A single, well-structured course for focused training

Launch small, validate the approach, then scale across your training programs.

Step 3: Map the learning journey

Before building in Smart Courses, outline the learning experience:

• What is the first concept a learner needs to understand?
• Which course or module comes next?
• Are there clear course prerequisites?
• What does “completion” look like?

This planning step applies to both learning paths and individual courses, making the build process faster and more intentional.

Step 4: Build Learning Paths in Smart Courses for Confluence

Create a Learning Path in Smart Courses:

• Add up to 10 courses to a Learning Path
• Arrange courses using drag-and-drop sequencing
• Add descriptions, labels, and categories for discoverability

Once built, preview the experience to ensure clarity and flow.

Step 5: Test before you launch

Invite 2–3 learners to complete the course or Learning Path. Gather feedback on:

• Course order and pacing
• Clarity of instructions and descriptions
• Overall learning experience

Refine your content based on real learner input, especially for onboarding and compliance training.

Step 6: Share and monitor training progress

Publish your course or Learning Path and assign it to the target audience. Use the training insights dashboard to track:

• Course and Learning Path completion rates
• Progress through the learning journey
• Drop-off points in structured Learning Paths

Use these insights to continuously improve training effectiveness.

Pro tips from our Smart Courses team

Start with solid foundations: Create clear, well-scoped courses and exams, then organize them into Learning Paths that guide learners toward a specific goal.

Design with purpose, not overload: Each Learning Path can include up to 10 courses. You can mix training courses and exams in any order, or build a path entirely of exams. making it ideal for onboarding programs, compliance training, and employee development, structured but never overwhelming.

Combine guided journeys with standalone learning: Use Learning Paths alongside individual courses to give learners both direction and flexibility.

Balance short, focused modules with more in-depth training to keep learners engaged while still delivering meaningful knowledge.

Explain the value of every step: Make it clear why each course exists and how it contributes to the overall learning journey.

Motivate progress with recognition: Certificates and completion milestones help learners stay engaged and feel rewarded along the way.

Refine with data over time: Once your paths are live, use analytics to review performance, spot drop-offs, and continuously optimize course sequencing and structure.

With Learning Path, you can bundle courses and exams into a single, structured journey, transforming scattered content into intentional learning experiences. Whether you’re building onboarding programs, continuous training, or upskilling initiatives, Learning Paths help learners see the bigger picture and stay motivated from start to finish.

Create and manage Learning Paths with ease

Learning Paths are intentionally easy to create and scale. Any user with creation rights can build and manage Learning Paths, making content organization more inclusive and collaborative.

From the editor, creators can:

• Add up to 10 published courses or exams to a Learning Path
• Set linear progression
• Restrict access when needed
• Enable certification
• Add contributors and collaborate

This flexible editor experience helps teams build a learning path experience while staying in control.

A clearer Catalog experience

To support discovery, the Smart Courses Catalog has evolved alongside Learning Paths.

Learners will now see:

• New filters that make Learning Paths easy to find: switch to change the types between Courses, Learning Paths or show all
• Dedicated “Learning Path” tag on cards that clearly distinguish paths from standalone courses or exams
• You can now combine the statuses to find the right course

These updates help learners quickly find what they need to start learning.

Learning Path Player

Once learners enter a Learning Path, the Path Player keeps them focused and confident throughout their journey.

With the Path Player, learners can:

• Move easily between courses in a Learning Path.
• See exactly where they are in the overall journey
• Track progress across the entire path at a glance

Learners always know what they’ve completed and what’s coming next without feeling locked into a rigid flow.
Another update in this recent release is that learners can access and download certificates directly from landing pages. This applies to Learning Paths and courses as well.

Powerful insights

Learning Paths are fully integrated into global insights dashboards, giving admins and managers a clearer view of learner engagement and progress.

Learning Path insights include two dedicated dashboard views:

• One focused on courses and exams within the path
• Another focused on learner progress across the entire journey

Reports automatically include only users with access to each Learning Path, ensuring accurate, actionable data you can trust.

Confluence is where your teams collaborate, document knowledge, and share content. To add structured training and compliance management, Smart Courses for Confluence turns your wiki into a full-featured LMS. The app lets you build courses, quizzes, and certifications directly inside Confluence.

In the latest release, we’ve significantly enhanced the Course Insights dashboard, making learner progress and course versions crystal-clear. Training admins can now instantly see if a learner session is based on an outdated course version, and reports can be broken down by version. These improvements deliver reliable, version-specific analytics that are essential for compliance audits and continuous training.

Enhanced course insights & version tracking

We’ve enhanced the Course Insights section to make tracking learner data clearer and version-specific.

• When a new major course version is published, existing learner sessions from older versions are automatically deprecated.
• Each course title now shows the latest version and when the course was last saved.
• Next to each learner’s name, an icon now shows if their session was completed on an outdated course version. By hovering over the icon, you can see which version they took. Learners can reopen the course player to access the latest version and automatically update their session.
• When data is exported to Excel, each course version with submitted answers to questions will now appear on a separate sheet, giving you clearer version-based reporting.

These changes make Insights more reliable, especially for compliance, audits, and tracking ongoing training performance.

Major versions: What counts as a significant update

Not every edit creates a new major version. Smart Courses automatically creates a new major version only when substantial changes are made to the default-language content, such as:

• Content edits: Adding, removing, or editing course sections or components in default language.
• Reordering: Changing the order of sections or components.
• Exam parameters: Updating the minimum pass score.
• New SCORM package: Uploading a new SCORM file.
• Version restore: Rolling back to a previous version of the course.

Minor edits, such as translations or minor course settings changes, do not trigger a new major version.

When a major update is published, the course card and landing page display a “New Content” tag to notify learners.

Course editing rules & Session protection

To preserve the accuracy of learner data across versions, Smart Courses enforces several editing safeguards once learners are enrolled:

• Course type locked: You can’t switch between “exam” and “regular” course types after learner sessions exist. This ensures consistent reporting in Insights.

• Quiz integrity: When editing quiz questions that already have learner responses, changing the answer choices may impact existing data.
  A warning message will appear before saving, reminding you to be cautious before making these changes.

• Certificate protection: If at least one learner has earned a certificate, the certificate feature cannot be disabled in the course editor.
  However, the “Only when pass” setting can still be modified.

These safeguards ensure historical results remain intact and reporting stays consistent over time. You maintain a clear audit trail, with edits that could affect past results either restricted or clearly controlled.

Learner view: Update notifications & certificates

Learners will now see a new information panel on the course landing page whenever a new major version of the course is published.
This helps them know when updates are available and ensures they always learn from the most recent version.

Importantly, when a learner completes a course and earns a certificate, that certificate remains linked to the version they completed.
Any new major version published afterward won’t affect their earned certificate or progress.

Why This Matters

These updates give teams better visibility into training activity across evolving course content.
You can clearly see:

• Which version did each learner complete?
• When and how the course content changed
• How updates affect completion rates and results over time

With session deprecation and enhanced version visibility, Smart Courses for Confluence makes learning data more transparent, accurate, and actionable. You can confidently track, manage, and trust your team’s training history even as courses grow and evolve.

This release brings a smoother course experience, smarter collaboration, and faster content creation, all designed around how teams actually work. From reusing course sections and components across spaces to simplified course access and cleaner course card design, everything in this update helps you save time, stay organized, and keep your learning process flowing inside Confluence

Let’s explore what’s new!

Import Sections and Components Across Spaces

Before this release, only components and sections from courses published in the same space could be imported.
Now, you can import sections and components from courses created and published in other Confluence spaces, saving hours of setup time.

This update is handy for teams that manage training across multiple spaces, HR, Product, or Compliance… who can now reuse modules, quizzes, or whole sections without starting from scratch.

This new import capability keeps content aligned and up to date across your entire organization.

Improved Course Player Access

We’ve refined how learners access and interact with their courses to create a smoother, more intuitive experience.

The Play, Resume, and Revisit buttons are now located directly on the course landing page, providing a clear and consistent starting point for every learner. Learners can access the landing page by clicking a course thumbnail or title. This update helps users quickly pick up where they left off or restart a course without having to navigate multiple screens.

We’ve moved secondary actions such as comments, share, and delete to a three-dot (⋯) menu, keeping the card layout clean and focused. The status indicator now appears directly on the course card, allowing learners to see whether a course is ongoing or done instantly.

We’re continuously improving Smart Courses to make it the most seamless, native learning experience in Confluence.

Stay tuned for the upcoming release!