In many Course configurations, it is necessary to pace your Learners' progress through the provided content. Presenting all of your content up front can make navigation difficult for the Learner. On the other hand, manually enrolling your Users in new Courses as they progress would be overwhelming for your Administrators. Fortunately, Absorb LMS offers several different ways to automatically introduce pacing through your content.

Course Chapters

To begin, the most obvious choice is to take advantage of Chapter functionality in your online Courses. The Syllabus tab, found when adding or editing a Course, allows you to organize your Lessons into Chapters. You can use this strategically with the All Lessons, in Order by Chapter option found in the above Must Complete section. When you select this option, all but the first Chapter are displayed but inaccessible to a Learner who has just been enrolled in the Course. As the Learner completes Chapters, subsequent Chapters unlock.

Curricula

Curricula offer the most versatile means of providing a structured learning path through your Courses. Simply put, Courses are to a Curriculum what Lessons are to a Course. A Curriculum arranges a series of individual Courses into a structured learning path and provides high-level reporting on your Learners' progress through that series. Just as a Course has Chapters that can be configured to pace your Learners, Curricula offer Course Groups, configured in the Courses tab when editing a Curriculum. Similar to your Course Chapters, you can pace access to these Course Groups by enabling the Pace Progress toggle, which forces completion of each group before the next one starts.

Another useful feature is found in the individual completion requirements for Course Groups. You can configure them to require completion of all Courses in the group, or only a certain number of them. This is an effective way to provide an elective approach to your Courses: Learners can choose different paths through your Course Groups to unlock the next one. You can even make entire Course Groups optional by setting their requirements to zero Courses, which is great for extra-curricular learning.

For more information, see Overview of Curriculum Settings and How Curriculum Progress is Calculated.

Prerequisites

While the above two options are great ways to present all of your content in one place, there are other times when you may want to offer your content à la carte. Setting a Prerequisite, configured in any Course type's Availability tab, is a great way to restrict access to a Course until the Learner possesses everything they need to begin it. Completed Courses, Valid Certificates, or Valid Competencies can all be used as a Prerequisite for a Course. Each Prerequisite can contain multiple items, and completion requirements, similar to the Curriculum Course Groups mentioned previously, can again provide an elective approach to how your Learners complete their Prerequisites.

The Allow Enrollment toggle provides an additional option that lets you determine whether Learners can self-enroll in the Course from the Catalog. When disabled, Users cannot enroll in the Course and are instead presented with a list of the Prerequisites they need to meet. When enabled, Users can enroll in the Course but cannot access its Lessons until the Prerequisites are met.

Important Notes:

• Curricula override all Course-level availability and enrollment rules. If a Course within a Curriculum has a Prerequisite, the Curriculum ignores it and enrolls the Learner in the Course. For more information, see Why Aren't Users Enrolled in the Courses When They're Enrolled in a Curriculum?
• If an Admin manually enrolls a User, the enrollment overrides the Course Prerequisite requirements.
• If Courses are selected as Prerequisites, those Courses must have enrollment rules the Learner qualifies for in order for the Learner to enroll.

Post-Enrollment

Similar to a Prerequisite, Post-Enrollment is another way to offer your Courses à la carte while retaining some control over your Users' access to the Course. A Post-Enrollment, found in the Completion tab for online Courses, Instructor Led Courses (ILCs), or Curricula*, automatically enrolls Users in a follow-up Course a certain number of days after the Learner is enrolled in, completes, or fails the Course you are editing.

*Post-Enrollment is not available for completion of Course Bundles.

For more information, see Post Enrollments.

Prerequisites vs. Post-Enrollments

Prerequisites and Post-Enrollments often achieve similar results, but they do so at opposite ends of an enrollment. Your choice between them usually depends on the method of enrollment you want to offer for the Courses you are limiting access to.

Prerequisites are useful if you intend to offer your Courses through self-enrollment or purchase in a Catalog. Learners can still enroll themselves, but only once they have met the required Prerequisites.

Post-Enrollments are useful if you would prefer not to offer your Courses in the Catalog, or do not want to rely on the User manually enrolling themselves in the Course. You can bypass self-enrollment entirely by automatically enrolling the User in the limited-access Course once they have been enrolled in, or have completed, the preliminary Course. Post-Enrollment also offers options for failure of a Course, allowing you to enroll Users in different Courses depending on whether they passed the preliminary Course. You can also trigger re-enrollments using the Post-Enrollments feature, which creates opportunities for interesting learning paths and recertification.