Video Tour of Admin Dashboard
This is a quick, high-level overview of our platform to run you through how things fit together and give you an idea of what's available. If you want to skip the video tour and get straight to building out your learning platform, check out our Platform Configuration Playbook or the helpful Getting Started: 6 Steps to Launch article!
You may also follow along with the transcript below, which includes links to other articles.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to this quick video tour of your platform! My name is Kat and I’m a customer success manager here at Academy of Mine. Today, I’ll be guiding you through this high level overview so that you can see how everything fits together, and where you can find settings and functionality. We also have an article called “ Getting Started-6 steps to launch” which will guide you through the basics as well. Let’s get started with the tour.
Right now, we’re logged in and looking at the Admin Dashboard. This is where you’ll land when you log in, and where you’ll be able to configure everything on your platform via the menu bar on the left. Let’s go through the most important sections together.
Courses are the core of your platform--this is where you combine your educational material, and how you bring your content to students and organizations. The Course itself is made up of different Modules, which together form the curriculum. Modules are individual parts of a course that actually contain the content, and there are different types of modules available so you can present the content in the most optimal way.
As such, you can add a Text module, PDF module, video module, Webinar module, or SCORM module. We also have modules like Quizzes, Assignments, and Discussions which allow you to test student knowledge and collect student responses.
Put a few of these modules together, and you have a Course curriculum. Once you have built out the content of your Course, you can attach a Certificate which students receive upon completion - if they meet or exceed the criteria that you specify. You can build your own certificates and we integrate with Accredible as well.
You can also combine multiple courses into a single bundle that can be sold together, allowing you to sell a course package if desired. Many of our clients are looking to sell their courses via their platform, so that individuals or corporations can purchase course access without the need for you to take manual action. This is a great way to make your platform more scalable. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the eCommerce section.
In order to be able to sell a Course, we need to set up what is called a Product. The Course(s) is the content that we want to provide, and the Product is how the course content is able to be sold. If you choose to sell your courses via the platform, you’ll first need to set up a Product within eCommerce, configure its settings such as general details, price etc and there, here, in the Content Access is where you choose what courses will be included with this product. You can select individual courses, course categories, or you can also opt to use a membership plan if you have that set up as well.
Once set up, it will show on the Course Catalog page where visitors can go and purchase it, and as a result automatically get set up with access to the associated course or courses. Be sure to go through our Getting Started: 6 Steps to Launch article or the Creating a Product article, to learn more about setting up your courses.
Now let’s talk about users. When a user purchases a Course they will be set up as a Student. You will be able to see all Students – as well as other types of Users – in the All Users tab, which you can find under Users -> All Users. As you will see, besides Students, there are other User Roles as well. As a quick overview, there are 1) Admins or Administrators (which is what you are), 2) Students (which are the users taking courses), 3)Group Admins (which are accounts that can manage a student Group), 4)Instructors, which is the role for the instructors who offer courses and webinars. Also, you might see what we call a 5) Super Admin which is what we are. We will use that account to be able to provide hands-on support when needed.
So, back to Students. From the Admin Dashboard, you will be able to view and edit the profile of each student, switch to their profile to see things through their eyes, go to their profile, delete them, manually enroll them in courses, manage their course, view certificates, activity and order. If you go to their profile there are more options available to you there. Now, let’s take a look and login as a student, so you can see what the platform and your courses will look like to them.
As you can see, Students have their own dashboard as well. This is where they go to get access to the courses that they are enrolled in, as well as see the certificates they have earned, and see Announcements that you might have set up.
Let’s go ahead and launch one of the courses they are enrolled in, and see what this looks like. As you can see, when we first arrive at this Launch page, which shows some information on the course, as well as the progress of the student and some action buttons allowing them to continue where they left off, or launch a module.
As you can see here, some modules are unavailable and this is because we are using module locking. In this case, it means we first need to complete the first module before being able to access the second. Let’s briefly go through the course so I can give you an idea of what each module type looks like, and you can determine what modules fit your course content best.
The text module is one of the most commonly used modules and allows clients to build out text content. This allows you to set headers, paragraphs, lists, add images, and so forth. It’s a really powerful tool that is especially helpful when you still need to build out your content from scratch.
Here we have a video module. Videos are an excellent way of providing course content, and many of our clients have found that students enjoy video content. There are some module specific settings that are available as well, such as disabling forward tracking and completion tracking as you can see here. If you have disabled forward tracking turned on, students won’t be allowed to skip forward on the video. If you turn on track completion, students will have to watch the video until the end to mark the module as completed. You can combine these two settings, and also lock the module as well, for instance if you wanted to ensure that students couldn’t skip the video before going to the next module. You’re also able to set minimum times to be spent in each module for each module type.
Right now, we are looking at the PDF module. We have designed this in such a way that you can either scroll through the PDF, or you can just the buttons to go through the pages. There’s also completion tracking available for PDFs so they will only be marked completed when the student has gone through everything.
The next module is a SCORM module. SCORM, if you are not familiar, is a framework that is used to provide educational content online in a portable and configurable form. Programs like Articulate, and iSpring, allow you to build what is essentially interactive PowerPoints, and include them inside webpages. It’s an immensely popular format to provide educational content in, and as such, we have built our platform to fully integrate with it.
We also offer you the ability to set up Webinars. These are real-time sessions you can set up that students can join, and where you or an instructor can teach students as if in a classroom. The Webinar platforms we integrate with include Zoom, GoToWebinar, Vimeo Live Streaming and Microsoft Teams. It’s a great way to engage students on the subject matter as well as make them feel connected to the instructor and their peers. They’re able to launch the webinar from within their browser when the time is right.
A Quiz module allows you to test your students on the knowledge they have picked up. You can ask them multiple choice questions, multiple correct, or short answers. As you can see, there’s also the option to retake a quiz. You may choose if retakes are allowed and how many.
The Assignment module has the same goal of the Quiz in that it gives you an opportunity to evaluate your student’s knowledge and verify that they are growing comfortable with the topic. With assignment modules, you can opt to have the student enter a response in the given text area, or you have the option to have them attach and submit a file, image, or whatever format works best, and you or the course instructor will evaluate their assignment submission manually.
There’s also have a Discussion module which makes it possible to create somewhat of a Discussion forum inside the course. Here, students can share their thoughts with each other and the instructor, and it can also be used in the passing criteria of the course.
There’s also the Survey module, which is a great opportunity to collect feedback from your students if you so choose.
Once the student has completed the course, they will receive the associated certificate.
Now let’s go back to the admin view to check out the page builder. Another important part of your platform will be your front-end website, where a customer can purchase your Course and where a Student will log in to access their Course. If you don’t already have a marketing website, you can also use this to completely build a site for your business as well!
In the Pages and Menus tab in your Admin dashboard, you will find the ability to add and build pages that will be shown on your website. This is where you can edit existing pages such as the Custom Catalog, Home Page, About Us page, and Contact Us page, or you can create completely new pages. If you are looking to get your hands dirty building out these pages, be sure to check out our article on Using the Page builder which will explain how our page builder works.
One of the most popular features that we have is our Groups feature. We have built this after working with many business-to-business clients that sell courses to organizations and institutions in bulk. The Groups feature is specifically designed to allow you to onboard organizations, sell course seats in bulk, and delegate the management of the students to company representatives, which are Group Admins in our system we mentioned earlier.
One of the biggest issues that B2B clients experience when selling online courses to organizations is scaling and management of the courses. The Groups feature is the perfect solution for this. You can either allow your clients to purchase their course seats via the platform and have them automatically set up as a Group, or you can decide to keep your billing via traditional invoicing and manually create a Group with the correct courses associated.
And last, but not least, is our Reports tab. The Reports tab shows you the data of your platform in a visual manner, providing insight into Revenue and Order data over time, as well as Course and Student insight and allows you to download this data as well if you wish to collect it from the platform.
If you are stuck or have any questions at all, be sure click on the little Support button in the bottom right of your Admin Dashboard. We have a ton of help articles written that will come up under the answers tab, and you can search for what you’re looking for in the search bar. If you can’t find what you need click over to the ask tab. Enter your question, send it to us, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
That’s it! This was a really high-level tour of the platform with the goal of helping you understand how it all fits into place. I have skipped a lot of details that I really recommend you explore our documentation.
If you have not started building out your platform and content, be sure to dive into our article named Getting Started: 6 Steps to Launch which will walk you through setting up your company’s branding, building out your first course, selling it, and more.
We are incredibly excited to have you with Academy of Mine and are looking forward to seeing your platform grow. On behalf of the entire Academy of Mine team: welcome!