Organizing Your Curriculum

General instructions and tips for organizing your courses, programs, etc. in Prosperity LMS

Organizing your curriculum, Step by Step 

Our customers often ask for help or advice about organizing their curriculum. If your course catalog is relatively small and simple, this may not be an issue for you, but for large or complicated catalogs, you may be wondering where to begin. 

This document contains some of the best advice we can give you when you are deciding how to group your courses into programs and what training rules will apply in what cases. We also provide one method that has helped customers in the past as they’ve tackled this task. 

You may find that more specific advice would be useful to you. If so, please contact your project manager at padmin@ziiva.com to schedule a consultation. 

What courses do you have? 

To get started, make a list of all of your courses by name. We recommend using a spreadsheet for this. 

Some other information that would be helpful to have handy: 

• Your Company Hierarchy as defined in Prosperity 
• Your list of Job Roles from Prosperity, if you are using them. 

If you are just getting set up and don’t know these things yet, no problem, just proceed using the information you do have for now. 

Who is required to take these courses? 

The next step is to enter the groups of people who are required to take each course. “Groups of people” in Prosperity means Companies and/or Job Roles.  

• If everyone is required to take everything or there are no strictly required courses, you can skip this step.  
• For more information about your Company Hierarchy, ask your trainer for the Prosperity Companies “cheat sheet.” 

• For more information about Job Roles, ask your trainer for the Prosperity Overview “cheat sheet.” 

If you are just getting set up and don’t know your Company Hierarchy or Job Roles yet, just come up with a word or short phrase to describe each group and use that for now. 

If your groups are separated into Companies and Job Roles, create a new column for each of these; if not, just add one column for the course’s audience. If you need to enter more than one group name into a cell, put them in alphabetical order and separate them with commas.  

Hint: Be consistent in the way you type this list – if you put a space after each comma in one cell, do it in all the cells. All cells that have the same groups should look identical. This will make it possible to use powerful tools in your spreadsheet program to sort and group your courses and help you make decisions about them. 

When does this training occur? 

Make a new column to store information about the timing of the training. For example, your New Employee Orientation course probably happens at onboarding time, maybe in the first 7 days from hire. Note this next to that course, and add any other timing information that may be relevant to each course. 

If any of your training must be completed again and again over time in order to maintain a certification or compliance of some kind, include both the timing of the first completion of the course and the recurrence frequency.  

Stop and Regroup 

At this point, your spreadsheet might look something like this:  

You still have other questions to consider, but this is a good time to take a look at your information and start creating some tentative programs to work with.  

First, you will want to take stock of your audiences.  

1. Sort your spreadsheet by Job Roles if you are using them, and then by Companies. 

1. Take a look at the way these groups sort together. Since you’ve put them in alphabetical order within each cell, all the rows containing the same list of Companies or Job Roles will be together.  

1. Now add a new column called “Program” and put a number in that column for each course as follows: 

1. The first course gets number 1.  

1. Any other courses that are required for the same groups will appear immediately below this course in the list, so give each course a 1 as you go down the list until you come to a course with a different set of Job Roles or Companies.  

1. Then give the next course a 2 and continue giving each course a 2 as you go down the list until the Job Roles or Companies list changes again, at which time you will start using a 3, and so on.  

Your resulting spreadsheet at this point may look something like this: 

 

Notice in our example that two courses have been assigned a 3, two have been assigned a 5, and three courses have been assigned a 12 in the Program column. These courses share audiences and therefore can be in the same program if other rules are also the same (we’ll get to those in a minute). The rest of the courses have different audiences, so they’ve been tentatively placed in separate programs. 

Also in our example, you may have noticed that every group of courses with the same set of Job Roles also has the same set of Companies. This may not always be the case in your curriculum, so be sure to watch for a change in either the Job Roles or the Companies when assigning the tentative program numbers. 

Apply Rules 

Now that you have your courses tentatively organized into programs based on audience, it’s time to examine the programs with an eye to other rules. You’ll want to consider all of the following: 

Timing 

There are several ways to set timing requirements in Prosperity, and they fall into two main categories: recurring and non-recurring training.  

1. Recurring Training: this category encompasses all training that has to be repeated periodically in order to maintain some kind of certification or comply with some regulation, rule, or policy. For details on how recurrence works in Prosperity, ask your trainer for the Prosperity Recurrence “cheat sheet.” For the purposes of organizing your curriculum, there are three main avenues you can pursue with your recurring training: 

• Recurring course: For example, a recurring course can be placed in a non-recurring program alone or with other recurring or non-recurring courses. Therefore, you could choose to have several recurring courses together in the same program, even if they have different recurrence cycles. 
• Recurring program: For example, if you have a group of courses that together constitute a related series where the entire group of courses must recur together, you can make the courses non-recurring but put them into a recurring program together, so that at the appropriate time, the program will restart and students will take all the courses again. 
• Scheduled recurrence: For annually recurring courses, you have the ability to schedule the recurrence for a particular time of year if desired. For example, a new hire takes Preventing Sexual Harassment during onboarding, and then again every October along with all other employees.  

If you have recurring training, decide now how you will set it up. Will your courses be recurring? Your programs? Does anything need to be scheduled at a particular time of year? Go ahead and tweak those program numbers now if you need to because of the recurrence properties. 

1. Non-recurring Training: this category is the simplest. This is training that typically happens only once, although it can be manually re-registered if desired. There’s little consideration needed regarding timing when organizing non-recurring training into programs, but if you like you can choose to alter how your courses are grouped into programs due to timing differences between courses. If so, go ahead and make those alterations to your spreadsheet. 

Auto-enroll 

A program can be set to automatically enroll students when they are imported or when an admin clicks Auto-Enroll on a student’s profile. Students are automatically enrolled into any Auto-Enroll Programs associated with their Company and at least one of their Job Roles (if Job Roles are being used). 

Auto-enroll is set at the Program level, and you can choose whether to auto-register all courses whenever the Program is enrolled. If you plan to use Auto-Enroll and Auto-Register, you will want to only include courses in that program that you want to be auto-registered.  

  

Course Availability 

A Program can be set to leave course materials viewable forever, until the student completes the course, for an amount of time after the student is registered, or until the program end date. Courses that need different settings for this option will need to be in different programs. 

Notifications and Reminders 

Prosperity provides automatic email notifications based on system events, such as registration, passing a test, or completing a program. There are also calendar-based reminder events, such as a course being due within 7 days or a program overdue. For details about automated notifications, ask your trainer for the Prosperity Automated Email Notifications “cheat sheet.”  

If two courses have different notification needs, they will need to be in different programs. 

Curriculum Rules 

Each Company in the hierarchy has a set of Curriculum Rules for each Program it is associated with. If you will need to have different Curriculum Rules for two courses for the same Company, the two courses will need to be in separate programs. For more details about Curriculum Rules, ask your trainer for the Prosperity Companies “cheat sheet.” 

Here is what you need to consider about each rule: 

• Inherit: if rules are inherited, you will need to look at the parent company’s rules to determine the actual rules that apply to this program. 
• Student Can Register: if checked, students in this company can register themselves into courses in this program.  

• Admin Can Register: If checked, lower-level (non-Enterprise) admins can register students for courses in this program (Enterprise admins can always register students for any course). 
• Passing Grade: If a number is entered here, any exams on any courses in this program that do not have a passing grade entered (that is, they are using the default of 70%) will be overridden to require this passing grade for students in this company. 
• Number of Retakes: This determines how many times a student in this company may retake a failed exam on a course in this program. 
• Discount: Provides a discount off the regular price of courses in this program for students in this company. If you are not charging for training, you will not use this setting. 
• Enrollment Approval: If checked, students in this company who sign themselves up for this program must first receive approval (through the Prosperity approval process) before their enrollment will be opened. 

• Registration Approval: If checked, students in this company who sign themselves up for a course in this program must first receive approval (through the Prosperity approval process) before their registration will be opened. 
• Billing Codes: Allows you to set up coupon codes that provide discounts on the purchase of courses in this program by students in this company. If you are not charging for training, you will not use this setting. 

  

Completion requirements 

You may or may not need to track completion of training for your students. If you need to do any of the following at the program level (some are also available at the course level, which would not affect your organization choices), then you will need to define the program’s completion requirements: 

• demonstrate compliance with any training rules or regulations 
• Provide a certificate of completion to the student 
• Collect a feedback survey from the student (such as a program evaluation or self-assessment) 
• Provide students a choice among comparable courses, such as the same course in several languages or a choice between a classroom version and an online version of a course 
• Enforce the order in which students must complete courses 

• Offer course bundles or require that a group of courses be taken together 

Completion requirements force the student to complete certain courses or activities, or the student’s choice of a certain number of courses or activities from a list, and can also be used to force students to complete training in a specific order. The completion requirements must be met in order for the program to be marked complete in the student’s record. 

This is another thing to keep in mind as you group courses in to programs. You will want to think about which courses are related to each other, combine to create a single training experience that would be a program with certain completion requirements, or which may need to be taken in a certain order or have prerequisite training. 

You can use a program’s completion requirements to accomplish these objectives, and may choose to group your courses accordingly. 

Other rules, settings, and considerations 

You may choose to group courses based on subject matter, putting similar topics together in the same program. Another option is to create a single program of electives – courses students are not required to take but may if they wish – and make it available for students to browse and sign up for as desired. 

There are other minor rules and settings that may on rare occasions affect how you group your courses into programs. If these turn out to affect you, please feel free to contact support at support@ziiva.com for help re-organizing your programs to accommodate that need. 

Finalize your Programs 

Check through your spreadsheet to make sure your tentatively-assigned program groupings will be appropriate based on all of the above considerations.  

Create your programs in Prosperity. At this point, you will need to have names for your programs instead of just numbers, especially if students will be looking at them on a course catalog and signing up for training. 

Ask your trainer for the Prosperity Overview “cheat sheet” for instructions about creating courses and programs, and feel free to contact support@ziiva.com for help.