SCOPING GUIDE
Thank you for choosing Noverant LMS as your online training service! At Noverant Support, we strive to ensure that your issues, tasks, or requests are resolved in a timely manner and provide follow-up to ensure you are given adequate support. This Scoping Guide provides you with information on:
- The overall concept of scoping
- Why privileges matter
- Scoping in relation to assignments
Scoping in the Noverant LMS refers to visibility and access to elements within the system. A user's scope is established through privileges and group membership. This concept allows for targeted and controlled interactions, supporting privacy and security, and more importantly, streamlines administrative tasks by limiting access to relevant features and information. There are a few important takeaways from the scoping concept.
Learner’s Perspective for Browsing Content:
A learner’s scope or view of the content library is controlled by their group membership. Learners will only see training that is “owned by” their group(s) and the parent group hierarchy tree. This group membership (working in conjunction with privileges) dictates what they can see in the catalog.
Note that Group or Individual assignments supersede any scoping to content items. These items are due and have direct access through the assignment itself, even if the items are not within the scope of a browsable catalog.
Visual of Group looking up to root group:
This allows admins to create controlled catalogs or even sub-learnings by scoping ownership to specific groups, therefore limiting the audience that can even view it in a catalog.
Manager’s Perspective to view their groups, users and content:
Manager scoping is another layer of scoping that determines what groups and users you can view. When you are associated as a Group Leader, i.e. listed as a manager, or approving manager, you are scoped to that group and you can view the users within the group(s) and the assignments made to that group on the dashboard. Further, based on privileges, you can search people, their transcripts, run reports and make assignments.
Your managers can assign training they are scoped to (based on catalog search as described above). When managers run standard reports, they will be prompted to select only from the group(s)they are associated with. Therefore, the data is of only their users under their “scope”. The power of the LMS reporting is that a single saved Standard Report can be used by all managers, providing unique results scoped to the manager running the report.
Group Admin Perspective allowing visibility to all users, groups and content under their “scope”:
As an administrator of a group, with the appropriate privileges/roles you have full access to users that are in your group and sub-groups. This means user details, transcripts, reporting, assignments and the content itself are visible. Their scope of content is training “owned by” this group and the hierarchy above. Their scope of users are those members of this group and all groups below.
Why Privileges Matter (Administrator Edition)
Scoping works in combination with roles/privileges and is extremely important to understand since it acts as the boundary for viewing groups, users, and training. Access is required before you are allowed to edit, assign, or report.
Each user can access and perform only the tasks relevant to their role to which their scoped.
Below shows typical privileges given to the Administrator role. This gives administrators access to view, manage, report, edit, and assign assignments, and many more privileges selected for the role.
Once these roles/privileges are set, the administrator is scoped to a specific group by being associated as a Group Leader in the “Administrator” list of that group. This becomes more important when distinguishing who should have administrative rights essentially over the entire content in the LMS. Giving a user the administrative privilege and being set as an administrator of the root/main group allows the user to have full visibility and privileges to all training objects, and users of every sub-group in the LMS.
Scoping in Relation to Assignments
Within an assignment, scoping involves defining the specific components, resources, and activities that are accessible to a specific user. It determines the visibility and availability of content, assessments, and other course-related elements based on factors such as the established role of the user and the scope of the assignment.
When an administrator is assigning assignments, it is important to adhere to the “Owned by” field. This field provides the group ownership of the assignment. Users that are scoped to this group are the users that are able to access the specific assignment. For a more general approach for this scoping, administrators may set the owned by field to the root/main group. This then gives access to all learners but will still be managed by the administrator, manager or instructor given the correct roles for this privilege.
How to Access the “Owned By” Field on Assignments:
- Go to an assignment in the LMS and click the “course actions” dropdown menu.
2. Select the “Edit” button, which will take you to the course edit page that allows you to modify the details of the course.
3. On the edit page, navigate to the top right side of the page and notice the “Owned by” field. In the search text field, begin typing the desired group name that is to be assigned the course ownership.
4. Last, scroll to the bottom of the page and click submit which will save this action and direct you back to the course details page. You will notice the change made to the “Owned by” field on the middle left of the page.
*Important to note that for admins/content owners that are uploading or creating content the "owned by" field is defaulted to wherever they are listed as admins of groups. These admins can only move ownership to groups they are scoped to. Ownership can have more than one group listed, but typically it proceeds to the highest common level. For example, you can't have something owned by ROOT and the sub-group. it will revert to the root group since everyone can see it.
Thank you,
Noverant Support