Since the release of Course Pages a few months back, we’ve introduced a few enhancements to for how those work, and to Courses more broadly.  Let’s see what’s new!

Course Page Menu Sub-Menus

This is a bit of a mouth full, but nevertheless a welcome addition which jibes nicely with what folks expect in a Course display.

Course Pages are broken into Sections.  When designing those Sections, one can make an ordered sequence of whatever items one desires: Actions, Worksheets, Files and more make up the building blocks of a section.

The entire course is navigable by those sections in the Course Page left menu.  With the addition of sub-menus, you and your clients can now view (and navigate to) individual items within those Sections.

Even if not clickable yet, these menus give your clients a sense for the road ahead (if you allow it!).

This is especially nice when you opt for the “Participants can see complete timeline” visibility setting, as it means now clients are welcome to see a summary of the road ahead, even for portions of the course not yet released.

Course Progress Meters

You can now opt to have the system display a progress bar for their course, giving them an at-a-glance sense for how much progress they’ve made so far relative to the complete course.

As seen on the Course Page’s side menu, these progress meters update themselves in real time as your clients make progress.

You’ll find the place to turn progress meters on in the Basics area:

The Basics section of the Course editor is where you can turn progress meters on.

Once enabled, the Course Builder will accordingly let you set weights for each of the complete-able types of items, i.e. Actions, Worksheets and Files:

Indicate how significant the completion of a given item is by setting its weight.

The weights tell CA how much of the progress meter should show as being full when a complete-able item gets completed, and the result is now that you and your clients have an accurate gauge of how for they’ve progressed.

Course Page Position Persistence

When your clients are working through a Course as laid out in Course Pages, they might close the browser or otherwise navigate away.  Their exact position, including which Section they were in and how far down the page they were scrolled, is now remembered and instantly recalled whenever your client revisits the course page, making it easy to pick up from exactly where they left off.

Remixed Course Participant Details

The Courses area for a Client or Group now has a much more streamlined display, making more prominent the spiffy course thumbnails you can set, and more obvious targets to just click on the card in order to visit the Course Page (when applicable).  The progress meter appears in these cards (when enabled), as does a radial chart showing how far they’ve progressed (as measured in Days or Steps).

Click anywhere in the card to jump to the Course Page (when applicable) and hover to reveal other controls.

The full summary of how many items have dispatched appears now as its own pop up upon clicking the magnifying glass icon.  This summary display is now also available from the coach dashboard >> Courses area, by clicking a magnifying glass icon in the Participants listing for a given course.

See exactly where your client is in the sequence of items, and the summary of what’s done and what’s not (including timeliness!).

Course Pause Items for Step-Based Courses

There’s a new type of item you can now add when building your Step-Based Courses, and that is a Pause.

Step-Based courses are, by design, meant to be self-paced.  Clients can blaze through the assignment and materials as fast as they like, where the completion of one item triggers the immediate release whatever is next.

This is in contrast to a Day-Based Course, where items are generally dispatched on a consistent schedule of whatever you set (e.g. at 10:00am on Day 1, give them this, then at 3:42pm on Day 2, give them that, etc.).

With pauses, you can sort of get a hybrid approach: you can define segments of a course that are meant to be worked through at whatever pace your client desires, but then broken up by one or more pause points.

A pause point can be set to only manually resumed.  This is great for when you would like to have a chance to intervene, inspect their progress, or have a conversation, and allowing them to continue on only when you deem fit.

It can also be set to auto resume after some per-determined delay, and optionally resume always on a particular day of the week (e.g. resume this course on the following Monday at 9:00am).

Here’s what all of these controls look like when adding a Pause item to your Step-Based Course:

The “waiting for the next one as needed” for specific day-of-the-week resume rules is a bit of a mouthful, but this all allows you precise control over the flow of things.

A course participation paused in this manner is just like when you as coach manually do the pausing.  Accordingly, you can yourself manually unpause (or schedule a different auto-unpause day), whenever you like in the usual way, via the Course Participation editor.

And there you have it!

With these upgrades CoachAccountable Courses are now even more on parity with many popular LMS platforms out there, with their uniquely interactive bits tailored just for coaching to boot!  Big thanks to the several coaches whose feedback contributed to this bevvy of improvements.  Enjoy!