What’s New

As part of your Learner Experience, Absorb LMS provides organizations access to Skillsoft. This feature, available to clients at in .COM or .CA environments, allows you to import Skillsoft course content to the LMS and track users progress and completion.

Contents:

• Getting Started
• Syncing Skillsoft Learning Content
• Importing Skillsoft Learning Courses
• Skillsoft Licensing
• Skillsoft in the Learner Interface

Getting Started

To get started with Skillsoft content in Absorb, first, contact your account manager to enable Skillsoft on your portal. During this stage, you will need to decide on the Course Package you wish to purchase as well as the number of Licenses. Your learner's ability to launch Skillsoft content is determined by whether or not they have an assigned license, so you will want to ensure that you have purchased as many licenses as you require. 

Syncing Skillsoft Learning Content

Once you have established a connection with Skillsoft and our Support team has enabled Skillsoft with the necessary completed fields, the system will automatically start syncing your Skillsoft courses with Absorb.

Please Note: The initial sync of your courses can take a while depending on the number of courses. Courses will then be synced from Skillsoft to Absorb on a weekly basis.

From this page, you will see all your Skillsoft Courses. The courses that are synced to your portal are determined by the original configuration of Skillsoft at the time of your purchase. 

Importing Skillsoft Courses

After all your courses are synced to Absorb, any Admin with Modify Course permissions will be able to Import the courses they wish to start enrolling learners into. An Admin can select one or multiple courses from the list, and then use the Import button on the right hand side to bring up the Import Course window. From here you can select whether this course will allow Self Enrollment, have Automatic Enrollment enabled, what category the course should be placed in and who the course editors are.

It is important to note that Course Editors can only be added in bulk at this stage and will need to be edited at the individual course-level after this initial selection, so you want to ensure you have selected the right Editors.

Once you have finished importing your chosen courses, you can select the View Skillsoft Courses button. This page is pre-filtered to only display Skillsoft Courses. Here, Administrators with course editing permissions can select a course, make edits to the settings and add additional Lesson Objects (ie: assessments, tasks etc.) as they would with any other Online Course.

Please Note: As the course content is brought over from Skillsoft, the lesson section cannot be edited (i.e., lesson description, title, etc.). You will also find that the Skillsoft course thumbnail and tags (create from Skillsoft's Keywords) are brought over automatically.

Admins could also choose to add Skillsoft content after first creating an Online Course and then adding a Lesson Object type of Skillsoft. You can search for the Skillsoft course that you want to add as a Lesson, clicking the eye icon to view the description as you scroll. You can also add other object types into your online course, such as SCORM, videos or assessments to make a mixed content course.

If library licensing has been enabled in your portal, you will be able to create a "License Type" availability rule on all courses in the LMS, including Skillsoft only courses and the mixed content courses.  This will ensure that only users with assigned Skillsoft Licenses will be automatically enrolled or allowed to self enroll in a course containing Skillsoft courses. You can configure these rules at both the importing and editing course stages. 

Important: Skillsoft courses are not eligible to be sold via E-Commerce. Absorb does not support or endorse the selling of Skillsoft content.

Please note:  While it is extremely rare for Skillsoft to retire courses from their end, if this does occur, the lesson will be removed from the Absorb integration. However, the course itself will need to be either updated by the client, removed from the portal,  or set to inactive 

Skillsoft Licensing 

In order to allow learners to launch Skillsoft courses you will need to assign them a license. In order to do this you will need to access the Library Licensing menu from the Setup tab.

Once in this menu you will be able to see information regarding your learners and the licenses you have assigned to them.  You can also add or remove licenses from Learners here.

Please note: Library Licensing is only available to System Administrators by default.

You can add licenses to learners individually or you can create a one time rule that will mass assign licenses to learners based on the rule settings. You will also have the option to create an on going rule that will check to see if a new user or a changed user meets the criteria and then assign a license. You will also have the ability to unassign licenses from the Library Licensing page. You can only un-assign licenses that have not yet been used (consumed.) A license is considered used (consumed) only at the point that a learner clicks the Launch button on the Skillsoft course.

Please note: You can assign licenses to as many users as you wish. However, once you have hit the limit of consumed/purchased licenses as outlined in your initial Skillsoft configuration any learner that try to Launch Skillsoft content will instead see a "Not available" message. Inactive learners that have consumed a license will still count towards your total license consumption.

While assigning Licenses you  should check to see how many licenses have been consumed. To find this information, navigate to your main Admin dashboard. The report on the main Admin dashboard under the Courses tab shows the number of used and remaining licenses as well as your total licenses and contract end date.

Skillsoft in the Learner Interface

In the Catalog and My Courses a learner has the ability to filter their view to see a list of courses from Skillsoft. The option appears on the “Advanced Filtering” menu under the Libraries section.

Once enrolled, learners with valid licenses will be able to launch SkillSoft Courses and proceed through the material in the same way they would with any other course. 

Learners without a valid license will receive a "Not Available" message instead of a launch button and will unable to view the Skillsoft content until a valid license is applied to their account.