Audiences

Audience management allows site-wide user groups to be populated manually or dynamically using unlimited combinations of rules built on supplied HR data, user completion records, and other collected user metrics. The feature also allows each group to be assigned to a limitless number of courses, programs, and certifications. Audiences are especially powerful when used with HR Import. With both features enabled, your organisation’s enrolments throughout your learning catalogue will be automatically updated based on your regular HR feed and the extensive range of business rules you define.

You can use these groups to enrol learners in particular courses, programs, and certifications. There are two types of groups:

1. Set: A set group allows you to manually select and add any user to the group.
2. Dynamic:A dynamic group is automatically maintained based on a set of rules you create.

Set audiences

Create a set audience

1. Select Site administration >Users > Accounts.
2. Select Audiences.
3. The audience management page appears and any audiences already set up are displayed here. Select the Add new audience
4. Enter the audience Name. This is a mandatory field.
5. Select the Context. An audience can be set up at a system context or in a particular course category context.
6. Select Setfrom the Type dropdown field.
7. You can use the Audiences IDnumber and Description if required. The Audiences ID number needs to be a unique identifier.
8. Set the Start dateand End date.

Setting a Start date and End date only affects Dynamic audience types.

9. Set the Alerts. These control the notifications sent to the audience group members.There are 3 options:
   • Do not send alerts:Prevents alerts from being sent to the learners in the group.
   • Send alerts to affected members only:Allows you to only send notifications to audience group members affected by changes in the membership of the group.
   • Send alerts to all members:Sends all alerts to all audience group members, bear in mind some audiences can be very large.
10. Select Save changes.
11. The Edit memberstab will appear. To assign members to the audience group, search the list of potential users in the right hand column, select the user(s) you require and select Add. The user(s) now appear in the Current users 
12. Select Back to audiencesto return to the audience management page.

Edit a set audience

1. Select Site administration > Users > Accounts.
2. Select Audiences.
3. The audience management page appears and any audiences already set up are displayed here. Select the edit
4. Select the tab that holds the details you wish to edit:
   • Edit details: Allows you to edit the Name, Audiences ID, Description, Start date, End date and Alerts for the audience group.
   • Edit members:Allows you to add and remove users from the audience group.
   • Enrolled learning: Allows you to add and remove courses, programs, and certifications from the enrolled learning list.
   • Visible learning:Allows you to add and remove courses, programs, and certifications from the visible learning list. 
   • Learning Plan:Allows you to automatically create learning plans for all audience members.
   • Goals:Allows you to assign goals to all audience members.
   • Assign Roles:Allows you to assign roles with permissions to the audience members.
5. Select Back to audienceswhen finished.

Dynamic audiences

Create a dynamic audience

1. Select Site administration > Users > Accounts.
2. Select Audiences.
3. The audience management page appears and any audiences already set up are displayed here. Select the Add new audience
4. Enter the audience Name. This is a mandatory field.
5. Select the Context. An audience can be set up at a system context or in a particular course category context.
6. Select Dynamicfrom the Type dropdown field.
7. You can use the Audiences IDnumber and Description if required. The Audiences ID number needs to be a unique identifier.
8. Set the Start dateand End date.

If a Start date or End date is specified, audience members will not be automatically updated prior to the start date or after the end date. However, if audience rules are updated, regardless of the specified time, this will cause the membership to be updated.

9. Set the Alerts. These control the notifications sent to the audience group members. There are three options:
   • Do not send alerts:Prevents alerts from being sent to the learners in the group.
   • Send alerts to affected members only:Allows you to only send notifications to audience group members affected by changes in the membership of the group.
   • Send alerts to all members:Sends all alerts to all audience group members, bear in mind some audiences can be very large.
10. Select Save changes.

Manage rule sets

Selecting the Rule Set tab allows you to set rules which define the membership of the audience group. Rules are set up in groups called Rule Sets. A rule set can have multiple rules and you can include multiple rule sets for each audience group.

Automatically update membership

These options change the way that membership of the audience is updated based on when a user meets the audience rules. The configuration of these settings define when a user should be added to or removed from audience membership.

You can configure this based on the following checkbox options:

• Make a user a member when they meet rule sets criteria.
• Remove a user's membership when they no longer meet the rule sets criteria.

Unselecting both options will freeze membership until either (or both) of the options are changed.

Membership setting between every rule set

This setting determines how the audience rules will behave if you define more than one rule set. It is based on the logical AND and OR operators.

• If set to AND, then a user will only be added to the audience if they satisfy the conditions of allof the rule sets (they will be omitted if they fail to satisfy even one rule set).
• If set to OR, then a user will be added to the audience if they satisfy the conditions of anyof the rule sets (they only have to satisfy the conditions of a single rule set to be included).

Note that each rule set has its own separate logical operator to indicate the relationship between the rules within that rule set.

Adding rule sets

1. Select the Add ruledropdown menu and select the rule you wish to add to the audience group. There are a large number of available options:
   • User profile:You can use the fields from the user profile to add users to the audience e.g. Username, ID number, Language preference, Country and any user profile custom fields. 

Textarea custom fields are not supported due to performance implications and search complexity e.g. images can be uploaded, HTML input, etc.

• Position: You can use information from the position hierarchy to add users to an audience e.g. Position, Position ID, Has direct reports.
• Organisation: You can use information from the organisation hierarchy to add users to an audience e.g. Organisation, Organisation ID, Has direct reports.
• Learning:You can use the completion of a learning event e.g. Course completion and Program completion to add users to your audience group.
• Audience: You can use other audience membership to add users to your audience.
• System Access:Use the First login date or Last login date to add a user to the audience group.

Examples of Data Rules

Values in field

Rule: Before a selected date of 2 Jan 2017

Result

Current date is 5 Jan

Before the previous 2 days

Rule: Within the previous 2 days

Current date is 1 Jan 2017

Rule: Within the upcoming 2 days

Rule: After the upcoming 2 days

2. Set the rule options as required and select Save.
3. When a rule has been added to the first rule set, the Membership setting between each rule in this rule set option If you have two or more rules in your set this allows you to set the logic between the rules in this set. There are two choices:
   • And:The user needs to match every rule in the set.
   • Or:The user needs to match one of the rules in the set.
4. You can set as many rules as required to make your audience group. When you have added all the required rules click Approve changesto save your rules.

Edit a dynamic audience

1. Select Site administration >Users > Accounts.
2. Select Audiences.
3. The audience management page appears and any audiences already set up are displayed here. Select the edit
4. Select the tab that holds the details you wish to edit:
   • Edit details: Allows you to edit the Name, Audiences ID, Description, Start date, End date and Alerts for the audience group.
   • Enrolled learning: Allows you to add and remove courses, programs, and certifications from the enrolled learning list.
   • Visible learning:Allows you to add and remove courses, programs, and certifications from the visible learning list. 
   • Learning Plan:Allows you to automatically create learning plans for all audience members.
   • Goals:Allows you to assign goals to all audience members.
   • Assign Roles:Allows you to assign roles with permissions to the audience members.
5. Select Back to audienceswhen finished.

Enrolled learning

1. Select the Enrolled learning tab for the audience.
2. Select Add courses, Add programsor Add certifications to add courses, programs or certifications to the enrolled learning list.
3. Select the applicable course, program, or certification name(s).
4. Select Savewhen all courses, programs and certifications have been chosen.
5. The selected items have now been added to the enrolled list. You can remove a course or program from the list by selecting the deleteicon in the Actions

Learning will be made available immediately to new users once they've self-registered. Audience membership as well as audience-based enrolled learning (i.e. course enrolment and certification/program assignment) will occur before new users first log into the platform.

For existing users, audience membership and enrolment will occur when the relevant cron runs. 

Visible learning

1. Select the Visible learningtab for the audience.
2. Select Add courses, Add programsor Add certifications to add courses, programs or certifications to the vislble learning list.
3. Select the applicable course, program, or certification name(s).
4. Select Savewhen all courses, programs and certifications have been chosen.
5. The selected items have now been added to the visible learning list and will be visible in the course catalogue to all members of this audience. You can remove an item from the list by selecting the deleteicon in the Actions

Learning plan

It is possible to create new learning plans for audience members. The learning plan template can be chosen and whether the template will be created as a draft or already approved. It is also possible to prevent new templates being created if the user has already got a learning plan based on the selected template. 

1. Select theLearning plan tab for the audience.
2. Select the Plan templatefrom the dropdown list.
3. Select Exclude users who:
   1. Who have an existing manually created plan based on this template.
   2. Have an existing automatically created plan based on this template.
   3. Have a completed plan based on this template.
4. Select Create new plan asDraft or Approved.
5. Choose to Automatically create a new learning plan for every new user who becomes a member of this audience if new users who are dynamically added to the audience should also have a learning plan created automatically.

If the Exclude users who setting has have an existing, automatically created plan based on this template set, automatic creation of learning plans will not be available.

If a user is removed from the audience any created learning plans will remain.

6. Click Save and create plans. A confirmation of the number of learning plans being created will be displayed and a history of the learning plans created will be displayed.

Goals

Once you have setup goals on your LearningZone Learn site, you can then assign these to a particular audience. This means that everyone in that audience will be given the goal to achieve. 

To assign a goal to an audience:

1. Go to the Goals
2. Click the Add Goal
3. If you have only a single goal framework you can simply click the goals you wish to add. If you have multiple frameworks then you can select the desired framework from a dropdown menu and then select goals by clicking on them. You can also click the Searchtab to look up a particular goal. 
4. Once you have chosen the goal(s) you wish to add click Save. 

Assign roles

You can assign system roles to an Audience. This means that the role assigned will apply to all members of that audience in the system context i.e. across the whole site. You can read more about System roles on the Roles page.

To assign a system role to an audience:

1. Go to the Assign Roles
2. Tick the box along the role(s) you wish to assign.
3. Click the Assign selected role(s) to this audience

Duplicate an audience

An existing audience group can be duplicated. This allows you to use the rules and enrolled learning list to create another audience group.

1. Select Site administration > Users > Accounts.
2. Select Audiences.
3. The audience management page appears and any audiences already set up are displayed here. 
4. Find the audience you wish to duplicate in the list; select the duplicateicon in the Actions 
5. The message Do you really want to create a copy of the audience '\[audience_name\]'?is displayed. Select Yes to duplicate. Select No to cancel.

Delete an audience

1. Select Site administration >Users > Accounts.
2. Select Audiences.
3. The audience management page appears and any audiences already set up are displayed here. 
4. Find the audience you wish to delete in the list. Select the deleteicon in the Actions
5. The message Do you really want to delete the audience '\[audience_name\]'?is displayed. Select Yes to duplicate. Select No to cancel.

Delete users of an audience via bulk action

1. Copy the audience ID number (this can be found/created under the Edit detailstab of an audience).
2. Navigate to Site administration > Users > Accounts > Bulk user actions.
3. Select Show moreunder New filter.
4. Insert the Audience ID into the Audience ID field (with the dropdown set to is equal to).
5. Select Add filterat the bottom of the list.
6. Select All filteredin the Available users column and then add to selection.
7. Set With selected users..to Delete.
8. Select Go.
9. Confirm & select Delete.

Nested audiences

Nested audiences allow you to base a dynamic audience on one or more other audiences using the Audience member rule. This appears under the Audience heading in the normal Add rule dropdown menu. 
 

Example:

If you had Audience 1 consisting of users A, B and C and Audience 2 consisting of users C, D and E you could create a new audience:

Rule: Member of 'Audience 1', 'Audience 2' (select multiple in the dialog).

This would give you an audience with users A, B, C, D and E.

Or you could create two separate rules (within a single rule set):

Rule 1: Member of 'Audience 1'.

AND:

Rule 2: Member of 'Audience 2'.

This would require the user to be in both audiences, so the new audience would only match user C.

If you have an audience that users other rules, and you want to add the members from one (or more audiences) to that group you would do it like this:

Rule 1: User is a Manager.

OR:

Rule 2: Member of Audience 'Audience 1'.

This one would give you every manager in your site, plus the users in audience 1 (whether they are a manager or not).

If you want to exclude an audience even if they meet the other criteria, you need to use 'AND' between rules and the 'NOT' operator in the rule:

Rule 1: User is a Manager.

AND:

Rule 2: NOT a Member of Audience 'Audience 1'.

This would give you every manager, except the managers in Audience 1.

If you need something more complex it may be possible using rule sets to put together sets of rules, and/or multiple levels of nested audiences.

Finding audiences

When a site has a large number of Audiences, keywords can be entered into the Search box to search for or filter all of the available audiences including category audiences.

Audience global settings

Audience global settings allows you to set the global alert options used for audiences.