Understanding your Automated Assignments (core learning)

What is an Automated Assignment?

Automated assignments deliver a course's core learning content to learners on a recurring (usually annual) basis, allowing you to "set it and forget it" with the training content that matters most.

For the Harassment Prevention course, the amount of core learning training and cadence will depend on local regulations; for other courses, a standard set of core learning is administered once each year.

Recurring assignments can also be used to ensure new hires receive training on a schedule that meets your team's needs.

Each of your Ethena courses can have up to one recurring assignment.

To explain how an automated assignment works, let's take the Harassment Prevention course as an example. With a Harassment Prevention recurring assignment:

• All enrolled learners will automatically receive core learning every year or two years on your annual training date, depending on the requirements of their location and manager status
• Learners who change location or manager status and require additional training to meet regulations will automatically be assigned that additional training
• New learners enrolled in the assignment will automatically be assigned core learning, either immediately or deferred to your annual training date (more on this soon)

What automated assignments do I have in my account?

Recurring assignments are labeled as "Core Learning" on your Dashboard page. When you click the assignment, you will see the following panel at the top, which houses a bunch of useful information:

What does this show?

• Sent Jan 1, 2020 = This is when your organization began this course and sent out your first recurring core learning assignment.
• Scheduled Jan 1, 2023 = This is the date when core learning will next be sent out. On this date, any previously assigned core learning will be archived and unavailable to learners in their learning center, as they are starting a fresh training cycle 
• The flag with 30 days = This is the deadline for learners to complete the assignment (in this example, 30 days from assignment). Learners will see this deadline in their learning centers.
• Auto = This means that all new learners added to the platform are automatically enrolled in this assignment.
• 3m deferral = This assignment has a 3-month deferral in place. In this example, any new learners added to the system between October 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022 (3 months before the annual training date) will not be assigned core learning immediately; rather their training will be deferred until the January 1, 2023 upcoming annual training date (for more detail on deferrals, see below).
• Repeat = This indicates that the assignment is recurring and will be sent out each year on the annual training date (Jan 1 in this example).

All of these settings can be changed by editing the assignment at the top right of the page. When you edit the assignment, you will see the following sections:

Annual Training Date

This field shows your next annual training date for this assignment. You can edit this date to one that is convenient for your team (note that your next annual training date can be no less than six months from your last annual training date). Each year on this date, new core learning is assigned to learners, and any incomplete modules from the previous year's core learning are removed from their learning centers.

Learner Enrollment

For learner enrollment we have two settings available. Auto-Enroll (our recommended option if you'd like to enroll all learners in the course) and via a CSV upload.

Auto-enroll: This will enroll all new learners into the assignment when they are added into Ethena. This means that you do not need to manually enroll individuals as they are added into your Team Members section. We highly recommend keeping this option enabled for required courses.

Manually via a CSV: You can enroll with a CSV file containing the email addresses of ALL learners you would like to enroll in a course's core learning. If you do add new hires, you will need to include everyone you wish to keep enrolled; if you upload a CSV with just the new hires they will be the only ones enrolled in the course.
The best process would be to download a CSV from the team members page, and then be sure that all the learners you would like are present in this file. Then remove all columns to leave the Email column remaining, and this is the file you would upload. 

*Note that when you upload a CSV with new learners, they will immediately be assigned training unless they are within your deferral period. There is no need to adjust your annual training date for new learners to be assigned the content.

Deferral Period ("Content for New Learners or Role Changes")

When a new learner is added into Ethena, the Deferral Period exists so that you can select if they get assigned training immediately, or whether their training is put off to your annual training date.

For example, if you have a deferral period of 3 months and a new learner is added 2 months before your annual training date, their training will not be immediately available. Instead, it will be assigned on the annual training date. 
If a learner is added 4 months before the annual training date, they will be assigned core learning immediately.

Applying a deferral period prevents new hires from needing to complete core training twice within a short period of time. 

Deadline

The deadline is a function that you can configure to track completion. Learners can see the deadline in their learning center, and you can track completion based on this date - in the assignment, learners "Within Deadline" have not completed training but have not yet passed the deadline, while "Incomplete" learners have not completed training and are past deadline. You can change this in the edit function which will apply to all enrolled. If someone was marked as "Incomplete" and the deadline is extended they will be moved to "Within Deadline".

Please note that Deadlines are based on calendar days and not business days.

New Learner Deadline

This is an option to set a separate deadline for learnings who join your team after you have already sent out training. This is to give them some extra time to onboard if you would like to offer this too!

Continuous Learning

This is a feature that allows folks access to automatically be assigned additional training over the year to keep course topics top of mind. Ethena will automatically schedule these short assignments, which supplement your annual core learning. We have a schedule available in this article that details when the assignments are set to be released, and what topic each assignment covers.

If this setting is toggled on, continuous learning assignments will automatically be released to throughout the year to all enrolled learners.