Course Audiences let Admins give specific Learners, Groups, or Departments their own Access date, Expiration, Due date, and Mandatory settings for selected Courses. Instead of duplicating a Course for each population that needs a different timeline, you can build an audience once and apply its settings across Online Courses, Instructor Led Courses (ILCs), and Curricula. This article explains how audiences work, how to create and manage them, and how their settings are applied to Enrollments.

How Course Audiences Work

A Course Audience combines a set of Learners with a set of Courses and the overrides those Learners should receive. When a Learner who matches an active audience enrolls in one of its Courses, the audience's settings are used in place of the Course's own settings. Any setting the audience leaves unchanged continues to follow the Course's configuration.

The following table shows which overrides apply to each Course type:

Course Audiences change the settings Learners receive when they enroll. They do not control who can see or enroll in a Course, which continues to be managed by your existing enrollment settings. Course Bundles cannot be added to an audience. More information can be found in the Enrollment Methods + Options article. 

Permissions

Managing audiences requires permissions in the Course audiences group of the Role editor. The following permissions are available:

• View: view the Course audiences report and audience details.
• Modify: add, edit, duplicate, activate, and deactivate audiences.
• Delete: delete audiences.

Selecting Modify or Delete automatically selects View. System Admins have all three permissions by default.

Admins with a Department-scoped Role only see audiences that target Departments they manage, and some of those audiences may be view-only.

View Course Audiences

All audiences in your Portal are listed in the Course audiences report. To open it, go to the Courses menu in the Admin Experience (AE) and click Course audiences. The Status column shows whether each audience is Active or Inactive.

The report supports the same actions as other admin reports, such as printing, generating report files, and saving layouts. For more information, see Reports: Getting Started.

To edit an audience, click the Edit icon on its row. The More Options menu on each row includes the following actions:

• Activate: starts applying an inactive audience to new Enrollments.
• Deactivate: stops applying an active audience to new Enrollments.
• Duplicate: creates an inactive copy of the audience, including its members, Courses, and overrides.
• Delete: permanently removes the audience. This action cannot be undone.

Learners who are already enrolled keep their current settings after any of these actions.

Create a Course Audience

Creating an audience involves naming it, choosing who it applies to, and choosing the Courses and overrides those Learners receive. Follow these steps to create an audience:

1. From the Courses menu in the AE, click Course audiences.
2. Click Add audience.
3. In the General section, enter an Audience name.
4. Optionally, enter a Description.
5. Turn on the Active audience toggle.
6. In the Audience selection section, use Select learners, Select groups, and Select departments to add any combination of members.
7. In the Courses & overrides section, click Add courses and choose the Courses the audience should cover.
8. In the Set overrides panel, turn on each override you want to change and set its value.
9. Click Save.

As you add members, the Audience selection section shows how many Learners the audience currently matches. Click View learners to see the full list.

If you save an audience without turning on Active audience, a confirmation appears. Click Save as inactive to save it without applying it, or click Activate & save to apply it to new Enrollments.

Override Options

Each override shows Per course while it's turned off, meaning the Course's own setting applies. Turning it on changes the label to Custom and displays the following options:

If every Course in the audience is an ILC, the date overrides are unavailable and only Mandatory can be set.

How Overrides Are Applied

Audience overrides are applied when a Learner enrolls. The following rules determine which settings a Learner receives.

New Enrollments Only

Overrides apply to new Enrollments only. Existing Enrollments keep their current settings when an audience is created, edited, deactivated, or deleted.

Curricula Take Priority

When a Learner takes a Course through a Curriculum, the Curriculum's settings take priority over any audience overrides for that Course.

Overlapping Audiences

When a Learner belongs to more than one active audience for the same Course, Absorb applies the settings that are most beneficial to the Learner. Audiences are compared in the following order:

1. Earliest Access date.
2. Latest Expiration, or no Expiration.
3. Latest Due date, or no Due date.
4. Mandatory set to yes.
5. Most recently edited audience.

Locked Availability Dates

When an Admin enrolls a Learner with Lock availability dates, the locked dates take priority over audience date overrides. For more information, see Enrollment-Level Availability Dates.

Course Editor Banners

When an Online Course, ILC, or Curriculum is part of an active audience, its editor displays a banner noting that audience overrides affect some of its settings, along with the names of those audiences. Click View in the banner to see the audiences that include it.

A warning also appears below each affected Access date, Expiration date, Due date, or Mandatory field. Changes to these fields still apply to Learners outside the audience, but not to the audience's Learners. For more information on these settings, see Overview of Online Course Settings, Overview of Instructor Led Course (ILC) Settings, and Overview of Curriculum Settings.

What Learners See

Course Audiences do not add new screens or labels to the Learner Experience. Learners see their overridden dates and Mandatory status in the same places these values normally appear, such as the Course Catalog, Course details, search results, and the calendar.

Because the Mandatory setting can now differ between Learners, it also affects the following on a per-Learner basis:

• Which Courses appear in the Mandatory Courses Email Digest.
• Whether a Learner can un-enroll from a Course.

For more information on Mandatory settings, see Featured & Mandatory Courses and Learner Un-Enrollment.