Bulk upload is a convenient feature that allows you to upload a bulk set of user accounts at one time, while grouping them in their respective groups. Administrators can also use the bulk upload feature to make bulk edits to existing user accounts or to manage bulk account removals.
Features
Administration
Bulk Upload for Quick User Creation
Pre-Requisites Give Structure to Training
Training courses can be set up with pre-requisites to control the order in which students go through the training materials. As an administrator, you can set pre-requisites on training materials at the course level, or within a course at the section level. Pre-requisites provide the benefit of restricting access to more advanced courses, by forcing the student to complete prior course materials prior to taking subsequent training. A common example of this is requiring that your students complete Basic Finance prior to taking Advanced Finance.
Course Sharing
Course Sharing is a simple way for BlueVolt customers to share courses across the entire system and between universities.
It works similarly to requesting a friend on Facebook. You can see all of the courses that are available for sharing, send a request to the course owner and that owner can accept or deny the request. You can also ‘share’ any of your courses with other BlueVolt customers. This is another way we help our customers connect with their entire industry. It allows you to get more mileage out of your training by broadening the audience of existing courses.
You can see what courses are in the Course Sharing library in your University Admin, under the Training menu. You can also watch this quick demo to see how Course Sharing works.
Scheduling In Person or Online Events on Calendar
Scheduled courses are an easy way to manage live training events, including both in-person events and webcasts/webinars. For each event you can configure date, time, seat limits, location information, instructor, and reminder emails. Learners can check out and register for events from a calendar view or a chronological list view, both views can also be filtered by event type. This feature helps simplify your training calendar and registration process.
Backoffice Interoperability
API (Application Programming Interface)
The BlueVolt API allows your company to directly integrate with the LMS. The API consists of 3 components - Single Sign-On, User Management and a Report Service.
- Single Sign-On (SSO): The SSO component allows for user authentication (login) from an existing system. This means that users are automatically logged into the LMS, and do not have to login or create another account in the LMS to gain access to training. Data updates occur when the user comes through the SSO. (via XML)
- User Management: The user management portion of the API allows you to maintain consistent user data that syncs with an existing system, such as an HRIS or CRM, which contains information about user authorization. The user management piece includes three end points for updating user data (Add/Sync/Delete). It allows you to control an individual's group roles, course enrollments, training track enrollments, and sending of welcome emails. (via JSON or XML)
- Report Service: The report service component allows you to automatically pull reporting data out of the BlueVolt LMS. It includes reporting data on course enrollments and completions, including date and times. (via XML)
Certification Management
Completion Certificates
You have the ability to add completion certificates to individual courses or across all courses in your system. Completion certificates can be designed and customized to match to your company's brand. Certificates are automatically created and dynamically populated for students instantly upon successful completion of a training course. Information can be dynamically populated into the certificate using tokens, such as the student's name, course name, completion date, etc. Students will instantly receive electronic completion certificates (PDF format) upon successful completion that can be saved, emailed or printed out.
Training Tracks
Training Tracks are a way to organize a set of courses into a curriculum of training for your students. Training Tracks can be used for certifications, job/role based training, or any set of curriculum. The track will monitor the students' percentage to completion on their home page, and provide the students with a checklist of courses to complete. You also have the ability to add a schedule to your Training Track that will monitor days from enrollment to completion for the student, which also includes email reminders and notification to the student as well as their administrators to make sure everyone stays on track.
LMS Support for Multiple Departments and Extensibility of Business Rules
Group Management to Organize Users
Groups are an easy way to organize your users into like groups (such as companies, department, locations, role, or lines of businesses). The group hierarchy is completely customizable to meet your company's needs, it can be as simple or extensive as is needed. Grouping users can provide many benefits to your training program, including restricting courses to certain groups, assigning administrators based on groups, and reporting on certain groups.
Restricting Courses to Certain Users
Course restrictions allow you to restrict a course or a set of courses to a specific group of users (or set of groups) within your LMS. For example, you can restrict a management training course so that it is only available to your sales department, or restrict a software training class to certain branches which are currently using that specific software. If a course is restricted to certain groups, and a user is not in one of those groups, then the course will not display in the course catalog for self-registration nor will administrators be able to enroll them in the course.
Mobile Learning
Mobile Branding & Design
We have added some smashing design changes to the BlueVolt LMS's mobile site. Each of our customer university's branding now displays in the mobile interface, including both a logged-in view and the non-logged page. You can see in this example how the BlueVolt CEU logo and brand is prominently displayed in the top banner as well as displaying the headers and footers highlighting training content for this university.
Performance Management / Talent Management
Keeping Track of Everything Else (In-Person & On-The-Job Training)
Activities are a feature of the BlueVolt LMS that provide training administrators a way to easily keep track of on-the-job training that occurs in-person. This feature allows the administrator to setup various activities (similar to a course), but in order for the student to complete the training, they must complete the task (or training activity) submit for approval once complete, and then an administrator must approve the activity before it will show up on the student’s transcript and training records.
$BlueBucks: Rewards Made Easy!
$BlueBucks is a rewards program that we offer. Sometimes also called $BB, $BlueBucks are dollar-for-dollar rewards that act as a fun and effective incentive for online training. The $BlueBucks rewards accumulate on a student’s account across all universities and are redeemable for gift certificates from hundreds of retailers. $BlueBucks are paid to the student only upon successful completion of a training course, so you only pay them if they earn the rewards.
$BlueBucks are rewards made easy:
- Dollar-for-Dollar: $BlueBucks is a dollar-for-dollar program, 1 $BB = $1.
- Pay for Performance: With $BlueBucks, you pay for performance. Only when a student successfully passes a training course, do they earn $BlueBucks.
- Easy to administer: Simply add $BlueBucks to existing courses in the LMS, and we do the rest! Students instantly receive their $BlueBucks rewards when they complete courses, and you will receive a single monthly invoice for $BlueBucks earned throughout the month.
- Students Love $BlueBucks Rewards: Students can use $BlueBucks rewards in two ways:
- Pay for courses
- Redeem for gift certificates of the student's choosing (100’s of retailers available)
Reporting
Aggregated Quiz / Survey Results
Aggregated quiz / survey results is a summary report of aggregated results from an existing quiz or survey in one of your courses. Aggregated results show the spread (as a % and total number of user) of which answers students selected and also how many got the question right versus wrong. It is a great way to look for consensus or outliers in evaluations, identify knowledge gaps, evaluate commonly missed questions, and audit existing training effectiveness.
Dashboard Reports
Dashboard reports provide a quick overview of reporting information. Dashboards are available at the university, group (set of users), or at the course level. They contain visual charts, information, and contextual links to additional reports and actions that you can take. Dashboard reports can be emailed out immediately, or on a regularly scheduled interval.
Push Reporting via Email
All dashboard reports are available for push reporting via email. Emails can be sent in real time or schedule for future delivery. Emailed dashboards are a great way to share the success of your courses, push reports to stakeholders, and to help solicit additional training from course providers.
Export Course Reports
If you like seeing the detailed data, many of the course level and quiz data reports are available in multiple formats. Most can be run as HTML reports for quick viewing in the admin. Exported course reports and quiz results are also available for download to CSV (Comma Separated Values), which can be opened in Excel for further analysis.
Collect Demographic Information
The custom profile fields feature allows your company's administrator to add any demographic fields to the student's profile. These student profile fields are collected upon new account registration or next login. Depending on the importance of the data, you can make the field required or optional. You also have the ability to setup a drop down list, date fields, or open ended fields.
Support for Standards and Specifications
SCORM & AICC Supported
Multiple content standards supported, including SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, and AICC.
Testing and Assessment
Quiz Banking Allows for Multiple Test Versions
Quiz banking is a feature in which a specified number of quiz questions can be drawn from a larger set of test questions. This is a great way to ensure different versions of the same quiz or exam are served to users or to a single user during subsequent attempts on the same quiz. It also works to prevent answer keys from circulating amongst your students. An example of a quiz bank is when you have a quiz that is made up of 25 given questions, but you only want 10 random questions served during each quiz attempt.
Randomization Improves Testing Security
Randomization is an easy way to improve the security of your quizzes, exams and assessments, making it much more difficult for students to create and circulate answer keys. It also ensures that the student is reading through the options, as they will receive options in random order during each attempt of the same quiz. Randomization is an option on every quiz created in the BlueVolt quiz system; it is automatically randomized upon delivery to the student. There are few ways to add randomization to a quiz. You can randomize the question order, you can randomize individual questions answers, or you can do a combination of both question and answer randomization.
Surveys to Gather Student Evaluations and Feedback
Surveys are a feature that makes it easy to create basic surveys and evaluations. The results are automatically tabulated and summarized for quick assessment. Common surveys question types that are often used include Likert scales (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree Nor Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree). They are beneficial when evaluation a training program or course and when looking for feedback or suggestions for your user base.
Variety of Question Types Supported
The integrated testing system allows you to add quizzes, assessments, or surveys to your courses. All basic question types are supported, including:
- Multiple Choice
- Multiple Responses (Select all that apply)
- True / False
- Free Form (fill in the blank)
- Essay
All questions except for the the Essay question type are automatically graded. The student receives their grade upon completion if no essay questions are included, and upon administrator grading if essays are present.
The Learner Environment
Advanced Search Capability
Learners can use the advanced search feature that allows students to search courses based on course titles, course descriptions, and keyword tags. Administrators can add search tags (keywords) on each individual course to increase search results.
Student Transcript
The student's transcript is a training record of the student's training where they can see a complete listing of their entire training history. From the transcript, the student can see the progress on courses, dates that the courses were taken, download completion certificates, and quickly link back to course materials.