The correct set up of the Required Notifications ensures that your users are receiving the correct notification types as you intended. Listed below are some tips, tricks and best practices to help guide you through the initial set up.
Remember that this notification can only be sent one time to the same user for the same course. If the notification is being used for a course that needs to be completed multiple times, the expiration functionality must be used so that the Expiration Course notification can be used for all subsequent enrollments.
Also keep in mind that members of a required audience do not receive the standard “enrollment notification.” The Required Learning notification is the only method that the LMS has to inform users about a required learning requirement. If this notification type is not enabled, the learner will not receive any notification about the required course from the LMS.
Select the time span option of “Visibility on Development Plan” to give the user time to complete the course before their completion is expired (and they are past due). In order to use this option a value must be entered in the Expiration Appearance box on the audience tab.
Set the time span to 1 or greater to ensure that the user has the full final day to complete the course before receiving the past due notification. If the time span is left at 0, the system will queue up the notification during the evening of the due date. This means that someone could complete the course at 10pm EST on the due date and still receive a past due notification.
Since the system will not send two required notifications for the same course to the same user on the same day, it is important to calculate when each notification type is scheduled to be sent. If the days are not calculated carefully, then it is possible that the No Completion notification could be scheduled on the same day as the Manager Reminder, and since the Manager Reminder is lower on the notification hierarchy, the No Completion email would always be sent instead of the Manager Reminder.
Using this option means that the LMS looks at the last sent reminder to calculate when to send the next reminder, so there must be a previous notification. Typically the Required Learning Notification is the first notification sent, but if that notification is not used and the next notification type is set using Days after Last Reminder, that notification will never be sent because there is no previous notification for the system to use to calculate the send date.
This time span option will automatically send subsequent reminders, as allowed by the course settings.
Example: “10” is listed as the time span for the No Completion notification. If the user has 35 days to complete this course, they could receive this email 3 times before the completion deadline (days 11, 21 and 31).
Due to the fact that these notifications are sent out multiple times it is virtually impossible to use Days after Last Reminder for all notification types. See the example below.
Example: Every new hire is required to complete the course “Orientation” within 35 days from their first day of work. The notifications have the following settings:
The notifications will be sent on:
The Manager Reminder needs to be set using the Days Prior to Due Date option. The scenario could be adjusted to:
Now the notifications will be sent on:
Overall this is the easier time span option to use to ensure that all of your notifications will be sent, since each notification type is not dependent on any other notification being sent. However, you still do need to double-check that no two notifications are scheduled for the same day.
Below is an example scenario that could be used for a course in which the audience has 31 days to complete the course.
The notifications will be sent out as follows:
Overview - Required Notifications
Setting up Required Notifications