RSS Certificates vs Online Enrollment

Is anyone aware of a way to attach a certificate to an RSS session that won’t allow for online enrollment?

We use the SMS code functions for all of our RSS’s and we want our learners to have the option to view/download a certificate, but once we add the certificate object, the button appears that allows for learner to register/enroll for that activity online. Unfortunately, since we don’t have any required objects attached to our RSS’s (as that would negate the whole idea of our learners being able to text-in in the first place) once someone clicks on that button, they’ll receive credit even if the activity hasn’t occurred yet.

We don’t want to make any required objects for our RSS’s because again, we don’t want our learners who are texting in to have to go back online to do something in order to receive their credit. We also don’t want to use the attendance function because the code itself is the learner’s proof of attendance, and we would creating an abundance of work on the part of our coordinators to check off individual names since we can have over 100 different sessions occurring in a single week.

Unlike a course, you can’t password protect an RSS, or even open enrollment on a specific date, which at the very least would keep people from getting credit before the activity even occurs. And also since we don’t have any required objects, using the “Access Date” function on an object won’t help since just by clicking the button they’ll get credit.

Any thoughts on how to allow for certificates for RSS that we don’t want to allow online access to?

Thanks,

Hi Rachel,

Have you tried closing the enrollments? SMS users will bypass that, but other users will not, and enrolled users will still be able to access the session.

The steps would be:

  1. Navigate to the course/session.
  2. Click the “Enrollments” tab.
  3. Click the “Settings” link.
  4. Under “Enrollments are” select “Closed.”
  5. Click “Save configuration.”
1 Like

Hi - I just tested this, and closing enrollments does not seem to affect whether the “begin” button will show up. I created a session, added an evaluation course object, and set the enrollments to “closed.”

How I understand this to work is that when you create a new session, it automatically adds the “attendance” object to the outline. When this is a required object, it does two things: 1. It marks a person “attended” when they use the SMS code to text in, and it 2. Prevents people who click “begin” on the rss reg page from getting any further. (the difference between “enrolling” and “attending”) Even though a person who clicks begin is “enrolled” they would still have to text in the code to pass the “attendance” object, and would not automatically get credit or a credit letter if one is offered.

Hi Julie,

Are you sure the test user wasn’t already enrolled? If not can you email me the link to where you tested this?

You are correct, the attendance object will prevent a user from being completed until they are marked attended.

Ezra you are my hero!! It works perfectly. It never occurred to me to close enrollments cause I just assumed it would apply to the SMS code as well.

Thank you so much.
Rachel

So sorry Ezra - it is working now! I swear I wiped all enrollments but maybe I didn’t? Sorry for creating confusion!!

For what it’s worth, some of our coordinators actually do like having the “begin” button there. Two uses we have seen:

  1. People enroll early and the coordinator can use the reminder email to send them information prior to the session.
  2. People who simply cannot text in (we have one or two who literally don’t own a cell phone) can at least click the button to enroll and then the coordinator can just mark attended instead of having to backend enroll.

Hey Ezra, since Open/Close enrollments don’t clone or copy over, is there anyway we could change global settings to allow for that? Because although closing enrollments fixes our problem (above) we’re now left with needing to individually close enrollments for up to 100 different sessions a week.

Hi Rachel,

As @JAM mentions above, if your session has an attendance object, which is added by default, users will not receive credit unless they have be marked attended. In that case, even if a user does click enroll, they still won’t be able to get credit.

Currently the enrollments setting does not bulk clone and we do not have a way to bulk update enrollment settings. There is a related topic post for it here if you want to add your vote.

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