Training events and teaching locations
Overview
Training Events are IOMAD-specific activities that can be added to your courses. They are face-to-face events that have a location (real or virtual), a start date and time, and an end date and time. Training events can have waiting lists and can also be set up to require approval by one or more managers before a user is booked on an event.
Managing teaching locations
Teaching locations are the potential spaces where training events can take place. Going to IOMAD Dashboard -> Courses -> Teaching locations will list all of the defined locations and allow you to add a new one, edit one, or delete an existing one.
IMPORTANT: Teaching locations need to be created before you can use the Training Event activity within your courses.
- A teaching location needs a name which will be used as the room identifier.
- If the location is not virtual, then it will need an address and a capacity for the room.
- The description is used when displaying information about the room on the system.
- The capacity of the room is the default capacity and can be overridden when using this location for a training event.
- When creating or editing a training event, any potential date/time clashes for the location will be checked.
Managing training events
Training events build on Teaching locations to create a graded course activity at a specific date and time.
To add a new training event, turn on editing within your course, click on Add an activity or resource and select the Training event activity.
This brings up the Add/Edit activity page for the training event, which looks like this:
Give the training event a name, a description, a start and end date and time and select one of the teaching locations which you have just defined.
Choose what type of approval is required for this event. Options are:
- No approval – user can sign up themselves
- Department manager – either department manager or company manager can approve attendance
- Company manager – only company manager can approve attendance
- Manager and company manager – first department manager and then company manager need to approve attendance
- User added manually – no signup, the user is added by a manager to the event
You can now add the option to allow for a waiting list for the event and override the default room size to something else, e.g. if you need more more to carry out the training due to required equipment.
The remaining options are to send emails to the course teachers when someone is added or removed from the training event, to send reminders to the attendees before the event happens and an option to lock the event so no-one else can be added a set time before the event.
The option for Exclusive signup means that a user can only sign up to attend one of the exclusive events within a course. This is to prevent one user from booking multiple places on multiple different events for the same face to face training.
Managing event attendees
Once you have created the event activity within the course you can manage the attendees by clicking on the event title. This presents the following page:
Students within the course will be able to see the details for the event and, if allowed in the settings, the option to sign up via the Mark as attending button.
Clicking on the Book another user to this event button brings up this page:
If there is still space, clicking on the Book user button will add them to the training event. This is the same page as if you had clicked View the attendee list.
Here, you can remove a user from the list of attendees, move them to another training event on the same course (where there is room), or grade the user and mark them as having attended. If there is an active wait list due to the event being full, removing a user will automatically add the first member on the wait list to the event. Users can remove themselves from an event if they are booked onto it.
Approving events
Emails are sent out to the user when they are signed up for an event. Any event which requires approval by a manager will send out an email to the manager when one of their users requests access. They are also greeted with a message to say that they have event accesses to approve when they go into the IOMAD dashboard.
To manage the requests, a manager clicks on the Users tab within the IOMAD dashboard and then the Approve training events menu item. They are then taken to this page:
This page lists all of the active requests.
If the user is a company manager and the department manage has not yet approved and both are required it gives a warning (shown above).
Declined requests either go back to the previous level of approval if there were two levels of approval to either be re-approved or rejected, or are rejected entirely. An email with the outcome is sent to the user.