With Course Audiences, one Course can carry different dates and Mandatory settings for different Learners, Groups, or Departments. For example, a new hire cohort can have different due dates for the same onboarding course the previous cohort took. Until now, that meant copying the Course for each group and keeping every copy up to date. Now you build an audience once, reuse it across Courses, and maintain a single Course for everyone.
This release enables Course Audiences for Absorb LMS.
See this new feature in action in the Absorb Academy Course.
Availability & Impact
Who's affected: Admins who manage Course settings, and the Learners included in their audiences.
Important: Courses audiences does not enroll anyone. It changes the settings Learners receive after they have been enrolled. Enrollment and visibility work exactly as they do today.
Default state: On for all customers. Nothing changes for existing Courses or enrollments until an Admin creates and activates an audience.
Admin control: Managed through the new View, Modify, and Delete permissions in the Course audiences role permission group. These are enabled by default for the System Admins and Admin roles. Custom roles need them added manually.
This section describes the new Course Audiences feature, available from Courses > Course audiences in the Admin Experience (AE). For full setup steps and behavior details, see Course Audiences.
Course Audiences
Build a Course once, then create audiences for the Learners, Groups, or Departments that need different rules. Course Audiences are designed to be reusable, so you can use the same course audience across different courses. Find it under Courses > Course audiences in the Admin Experience.
Course Audiences builds on Department-level Email Branding, released in September, to help you run programs for many audiences from one Portal.
Built for programs like these:
- Compliance across regions: One safety Course carries a different due date for each region. When the policy changes, you update it once.
- Licensing and continuing education: Each state gets its own Expiration on the same Course. Learners in more than one state's audience get the latest Expiration.
-
Internal and external audiences: Make a product Course mandatory for employees and optional for partners and customers, without maintaining two copies.
Set up an audience
Give the audience a name and choose who it includes: individual Learners, Groups, Departments, or any combination. Then add the Courses it covers and change only what differs:
- Access Date, Expiration, and Due Date for Online Courses and Curricula
-
Mandatory for Online Courses, Curricula, and Instructor Led Courses (ILCs)
Anything you leave unchanged follows the Course's own settings. Save an audience as Inactive to prepare it ahead of time, then switch it to Active when you're ready.
How audience settings apply
- Settings apply to new enrollments only. Learners already enrolled keep their dates, even if an audience is deactivated or deleted.
- When a Learner matches multiple audiences for the same Course, the system selects a single winning audience based on the most beneficial timeline (earliest Access Date, then latest Due Date and Expiration), and applies that audience's settings as a whole.
- When a Learner takes a Course through a Curriculum, the Curriculum's settings take priority.
See audiences from the Course editor
When a Course is part of an active audience, its editor shows a banner, and each affected field shows a warning. Admins can see at a glance which settings an audience overrides.
Important considerations
- Due Date overrides take a specific date. Expiration can also use time from enrollment.
- Audiences don’t change a Course’s re-enrollment or failure rules.
More information can be found in the Course Audiences and Admin Roles & Permissions articles.
Comments
Article is closed for comments.