This guide explains the first steps to starting courses and assessment on a new HiringBranch portal.

You will have:

In order to get access to courses, all users must belong to a group that has been assigned a course.

On setup, there will be a default group created with all sample instructors and learner users added to the default group and all courses (or at least one course) assigned to the default group.

You will see at least one group on the Groups page.

Click on the group to open it and view what courses have been assigned to it.

If admin or an instructors create a learner but do not add that learner to a group, or, the group the learner is part of does not have any courses assigned to it, then the learner will see an empty login page with a message saying ‘no courses assigned’.

The users page can be sorted by first and last name, role and date of last login.

Click on the user's name to open the profile and see what groups the user has been added to.

From the Groups page, select Create Group. Name the group, then click Setup Now.

A training group is typically:

When that batch is finished training, it is disabled and the next group is created.

When a group is disabled, the learners in the group no longer see any of the courses that were assigned to them. But the instructors can see the results in the track page and in reports.

An assessment group is typically:

Each day, month or time period, the group that is finished is disabled and the new group is created.

When a group is disabled, the students in the group no longer see any of the assessments or courses that were assigned to them. But the instructors can get the results in the track page for scoring and get the results in reports.

After creating the group, you'll be on the Group Edit page. On the Group Edit page's Learners tab, click Add Learner. In the popup, select the sample learner and add them to the group you created.

The groups display on the groups page showing number of learners, number of instructors (if any), and number of courses assigned.

Visibility by default is active. When a group is disabled, it will display as disabled.

Groups can be sorted by the date they were created.

From the Groups page, select the Courses tab. Click Add Courses, then select the course(s) to be assigned to the group.

Or, from the Courses page, select a course by clicking its name. Then open the Assign tab and select the group the course will be assigned to.

Always login as the sample learner you added to the group to check the courses are assigned properly.

From the Groups page, select the group(s). Select Toggle Group(s) Visibility from the Action dropdown on the top right.

The users in the group(s) will no longer see any of the courses that were assigned to that group.

The instructors and administrators will see the group results in the Track page and in Reports.

The disabled group(s) names appear in the Groups page in italics.

After scoring and reporting is completed, unassign courses from disabled groups to remove them from the Track page.

From the Groups page, select the Courses tab and remove all the courses from the group.

This can be done on a monthly or quarterly basis to clean up the track page dropdowns.

Instructors can do everything an administrator can do, but, only for the groups that they are part of. If an instructor is not part of a group, then, they can’t add users to it or assign it.

A way to include all instructors see everything is to create a group called ‘Instructors Group’. Add all instructors to this group. Every time a new course is created, assign it to 'Instructors Group.'

The portal can function without any instructors. However, users who are administrators should be familiar with the system.

It is not necessary to delete users or groups. Simply disable a group and the users no longer have access. In this way, the data is retained for reporting and archiving purposes.

When a training group is completed and a new group is started

Name new groups by date to make it easy to sort.

Whitelists can be assigned to courses to restrict them to specific rooms/buildings by IP address.

Inside courses, individual lessons can be turned on or off by an instructor.

Courses can be duplicated and modified for different groups.

Make sure to create a duplicate of any course that is being modified, as a backup. From the Course page, select the course from the left side icon, then, choose Duplicate from the action dropdown.

A course consists of lessons and/or assessments which can contain 3 types of activities:

For more information on creating lessons and assessments, see the article Introduction to Creating Content.

Course titles can be changed from the Details tab:

There are three ways of creating user accounts:

An instructor or administrator manually creates learner users (or instructors) and assigns them to a group.

This is useful in assessment to create logins for small batches of students using their real names. The group is already created with the assessment assigned to it. The username can be a real email address or a made up one.

How do learners get the portal link?

An instructor or administrator imports a group of learners (or instructors) including the group.

For instructions on creating users by CSV import, see the article Creating and Managing Users with CSV Import.

This is useful in training if users are assigned email addresses.

The group can be created using the CSV file and then courses manually assigned to the new group after import.

Alternatively, groups can be pre-created with the training courses assigned. Make sure the group name on the CSV file matches exactly the group name already created.

How do learners get the portal link?

An administrator creates a self-registration link from the left-side menu for multiple groups that will be assigned the same or different courses.

An instructor can enable/disable a self-registration link for one group, from the Groups page.

Email or post the link for the learner.

The learner clicks on the link, creates their own username and password and self-registers for a group (which has already been assigned courses).

This is useful for when learners will be registering themselves for training courses. Learners choose their own username and password.