Displaying course content based on a learner's role

A role selector helps you to hide and reveal pages or topics based on the learner’s role or experience level. This can help you tailor a unique experience for each learner where they only receive the information that is relevant to them. You can set this up in Elucidat using Rules.

Contents:

1. Example of a role selector
2. Use case 1: How to set up a role selector to hide and reveal specific topics on a menu
3. Use case 2: How to set up a role selector to hide and reveal individual pages

Example of a role selector

This showcase course demonstrates a role selector in action. The course is aimed at two roles: HR team members and People managers. There is one topic (i.e. a group of pages accessed from a menu) that needs to be viewed by both roles, and another topic that needs to contain role-specific content.

First, the learner answers a profiling question to choose their role:

Learners will then see a menu of topics. Rules have been used to hide one role-specific topic and reveal the alternative role’s topic based on how the user answers the question. To find out more about how to do this, see Using Rules to reveal content.

There is also a topic that is relevant to all learners that is set to always be visible.

For example, the HR team member sees a topic called Get the theory: HR:

Whereas the People manager sees one called Get the theory: People manager:

As it is relevant to both roles, the Put it into practice: Everyone topic will appear for everyone.

This is a great way to personalise the learning experience and reduce learner time by making sure learners aren’t viewing irrelevant content.

We’ll now walk through two methods of using a role selector to reveal specific content.

Use case 1: How to set up a role selector to hide and reveal specific topics on a menu

There are four stages to setting up a role selector and using it to reveal topics on a menu.

1. Create a role selector question at the beginning of your module.

We’d recommend a single choice question here, which can be either text-based or image-based, depending on whether you want to visualise the roles. We’d recommend using a Survey question type as answers to these questions can be neither correct nor incorrect.

For information about the different question types, see Feature Focus: Question Types.

2. Create your topics and set up a menu page.

To create a topic, group all the pages that make up a topic into chapters in Pages.

The menu page is where you can link to each topic. 

3. Apply a Rule to the first page in each role-specific chapter.

When applied to a single page, Rules allow you to omit that page from your course and reveal it when a learner meets a certain criteria. Applying a Rule to the first page in a chapter will omit that entire chapter which means you can hide and reveal entire chapters based on a single Rule or Rule group. You can determine the criteria that a learner needs to meet for a page to become available in Page Settings in the Rules tab:

4. Add panels on your menu page to link to each of your role-specific chapters and set these panels to hide if the page it links to is hidden.

When setting up your menu, if you select Hide this link if the page it links to is hidden on the panels that correspond to role-specific chapters then it means the whole menu panel will be hidden if the chapter it links to is hidden by Rules.

Use case 2: How to reveal individual pages

In some courses you might want to reveal an individual page for a specific role, rather than a whole chapter. For example, you could show a role-specific summary page at the end of a course that presents focussed actions for that role.

1. Create a role selector question at the beginning of your module.

See step 1 of Use Case 1 for more details.

2. Apply a Rule to a specific page within a chapter

Applying the Rule to any page that is not the first page in a chapter will mean that the Rule will only affect that page. It will only show if they answer the role-specific question in a certain way. Here’s an example from an Elucidat module: