8 Workaround Tips To Help Reach Your Online Training goals With Coassemble

In our webinar last week, Rosalie took our customers through some of the best approved workarounds to help you bring your vision to life.

We’re always looking for ways to help you achieve everything you need when building online courses, but sometimes we have to help you think outside of the box to make it work. There are some questions we get asked more frequently than others, so Rosalie has answered them for you in this Workarounds webinar.

What does the term workaround mean?

Let’s start by being clear about what the term workaround actually means.

We’re highlighting what was taught in the webinar below for anyone wanting to revert back to it whenever it suits you best.

8 approved workarounds

You've asked, and we've listened! It's time to share some of the workarounds our customers have been asking us for. Please bookmark this page because you're going to find it super valuable.

1. I want to know that my learners completed a course, read a document, or watched a video

While you might not be able to know if a learner 'really' completed a training, read a document, or watched a video, these following workarounds will work for you:

• Make your content more engaging by breaking it up into interactive screens. This way, your learners are less likely to skip ahead, and you will get more accurate reporting.
• Follow your document or video with a quiz to ensure your learners 'really' understood.
• Ask learners to acknowledge they read a document or watched a video using a quiz question.

2. I want to drip feed content to my learners or create a learning pathway

‘Drip feeding’ is releasing content over time, rather than all at once. While there is no straightforward way to do this (we don’t have a ‘drip feed’ button in-app), there few ways to achieve the same end-result:

• Create a course with multiple modules (or multiple courses) with different availability dates, and enroll your learners all at once. You can even set up some email zaps to notify your learners when they become available.
• Enroll your learners to your first course via a group and each time you want a new course to be made available, add it to the group.

3. I want to send a customized email to learners

When you enroll learners into your course, they will receive a generic email. What if you want that email to be customized? The good news is that our amazing product team is working on that very feature but until it’s released, here are a few workarounds:

• Enroll your learners into the platform, but turn your notifications off & send custom emails via a third-party tool.
• Create your own custom emails where you can include our course enrollment links for your learners to self-enroll.

4. I want my learners to ask questions about a course

Want your learners to be engaged and ask questions about a course? This is something so easily achievable in a classroom setting, but somehow much trickier online. Fear not! Here’s some workarounds you’ll love!

• Include the email of the contact person or course trainer clearly in your course so your learners can reach out and ask questions.

• Use our Intercom integration so your learners can use live chat with someone from your team. Just a heads up – it requires paid Intercom account.
• One of the best and most accessible workarounds would be to use our embed screen. Include an open-ended form question and ask learners if they have any questions about the course. This way learners never have to step away from their course.

5. I want my learners to complete the same training every year

Coassemble only records reporting data the FIRST time a learner goes through the course. This means you won’t know if the learner goes through the course at another time or for example the following year. Basically this means a learner can review a course any time, but no new reporting data will be generated. So, what can you do?

• Create a copy of your course (for example, you’d have ‘2022’ and ‘2023’ versions of the same course) and re-enroll your learners to it. Use that opportunity to freshen up your content to reflect the time when the learner will need to complete it.
• Instead of putting together another course, you could test your learners on the original content and decide if they need more online training with another course to complete.

6. Some of my learners already completed my courses in another platform and I want it to be reflected in Coassemble

While we don’t currently have an ‘import learner progress’ button, here is how some customers workaround this topic:

• Create a one-screen version of the courses, so learners can easily & quickly re-do them if needed.
• Create a full version of the courses in Coassemble and have learners that already completed the course skip ahead to the final quiz module by using our advanced settings to hide other modules for a specific group.

7. I want to record live session attendance in Coassemble

While you can’t record live sessions in attendance in Coassemble currently, here are some options for what you can do instead:

• You can create a one-screen course with an acknowledgement question, and share that course enrollment link with the webinar attendees.

8. I want some of my courses to be optional and others mandatory

While we don’t have a toggle to make a course mandatory or not, we’ve got some workarounds that might just work instead:

• Use our enrollment links for optional courses so learners can self-enroll only if they choose to do a certain course. In this scenario, you would then enroll learners to the mandatory courses via by adding them in the system yourself.
• You could enroll learners in all courses, but put a due date for the mandatory courses only, to draw attention to them.
• You could put all the optional content in one big course and make it clear that this course only is optional.

Found this article useful? Watch the full webinar on demand to hear Rosalie talk more about the workarounds.

You might like to check out our 7 Secret Features To Make Your Online Training Shine to help you make the most out of using Coassemble!