Skilljar - Instructor-to-Learner Communication
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Skilljar has two tools for instructor-to-learner communication, despite not being primarily focused on instructor-led training:
Announcements
Automated actions
Announcements are used for in-the-moment communication, whereas automated actions are configured in advance when the course is set up. All communications in Skilljar are designed for all learners, as their self-paced use-case is not designed for direct learner mentoring or non-automated interventions.
Lessons Learned from Skilljar
Skilljar’s FAQs bear the following warning:
“Emails should be defined so that they can be categorized as transactional emails: informing students about their course, providing additional information or resources, or asking about feedback. Users should not use these emails to advertise their product since the unsubscribe option in engagement emails is legally not sufficient for promotional emails. Users bear the responsibility for ensuring that their content is not promotional.”
This is interesting to note for future emailing functionality. Compliance with various international laws goes beyond a simple “unsubscribe” button, as that’s what Skilljar offers, and is not good enough for promotional emails.
While half-baked, and not really anywhere near as powerful as they could be, Skilljar’s email automation features are a powerful concept that we could potentially expand upon to include automatic email scheduling and triggered emails associated with a course run, or with learners who fit an analytics profile in a similar way to Moodle.
Variables in particular are crucial to this functionality, as is an interface that simplifies the insertion of these variables and allows instructors to preview what they’re sending without actually sending an email. These are not features that Skilljar has, but are more clear gaps in their offering that offer us a place to surpass them.
Announcements
Announcements are essentially direct emails to all course participants. There are no options for which learners to send to, or advance scheduling, the email simply goes out as plain text within a predefined company-branded email template:
The only option other than sending the email to all learners in the course, is to send a preview of the email to the current instructor user. There does not appear to be anywhere in the UI to view previous announcements, making Skilljar announcements effectively a pure email tool.
This feature satisfies the following needs for communication:
One-to-All
Automated Actions
Actions in Skilljar go a little bit beyond pure instructor-to-learner communication, but are an interesting feature for self-paced courses that could also satisfy the needs of instructors outside of Skilljar’s niche.
Actions can be used to do things like send automated emails in the following categories:
Registration - email sent on registration
Engagement - email sent x days after registration
Completion - email sent on course completion
Post-Completion - email sent x days after course completion
These emails are limited in what they can do, though the way they are structured and talked about by Skilljar indicates that they may decide to add greater levels of automation to this in the future (for example, adding completion of certain content as email triggers is something requested in their community), though Skilljar do not appear to have a public roadmap.
Course creators can build their email templates, and use the following variables within the email itself:
student.full_name_display : The student's first and last name
student.first_name : Student's first name
student.last_name : Student's last name
domain.profile_link : Link to the student's profile page
student_course_progress.score : Course score
student_course_progress.max_score : Max potential course score
student_course_progress.score_as_percent : Course score in percent
student_course_progress.completed_at : Course completion date
course.title : Name of the course
published_course.url : Link to the published course
domain.url : The URL of your training domain
certificate.link : Link to relevant certificate earned
certificate.linkedin_button : Button to add certificate to LinkedIn
theme.email_display_name : Name as specified in the Theme email settings page
The different email types have different settings and limitations:
Registration emails are designed to replace the default system “You have enrolled in this course” emails, as Skilljar do not recommend using both together. They can also email the user’s organisation, for example emailing a partner org’s training team that a specific user has started a particular course.
When a user is enrolled directly by a member of staff, they only receive the default registration email, because they’ve effectively not performed the trigger action.
A course can only have up to 15 engagement emails, and they can be scheduled up to 365 days post-registration, with a minimum of 1 day after registration. These are intended as nudge emails to remind learners to come back to their active courses, or as reminders that their access will expire (as Skilljar courses can be time-gated).
Completion actions occur when the learner completes all the content in the course. They are used to send out a final message to the learner confirming their completion, as well as to issue certificates, and to notify their organisation that the user has completed their assigned training.
Post-completion emails are intended for things like sending out course surveys. They are not conditional in any way, so you can’t, for example, really use them for bringing learners back to the platform unless you’re fine with annoying some learners, as you have no way to tell they actually left in the first place.
This functionality partially fulfils the one-to-one and one-to-many use-cases, but not in a complete way.