VISION Connect differs from VISION Learning Station in how courses and events are managed. While courses and course events must be created manually in VLS, VISION Connect additionally provides a mechanism to create them automatically whenever a student issues a request from the LMS for a new course or course version. VISION calls these AICC-delivered courses "External Courses."
How VISION Connect creates External Courses
When a request is issued from an LMS to VISION Connect, a unique ID is sent that identifies a particular VISION Trainign Unit. VISION then calculates whether the requesting user should be placed into an existing course event, or whether a new course and/or course event should be created, using the logic below:
a. Is the user enrolled in an event for an active course? If so, use that course.
b.Is the user enrolled in an *open event on an archived course? If so, use that course.
c.Otherwise, the user is not assigned to a course event, so we check to see if the program has a new version, if it does we automatically version the course in VLS and assign the user to an event on the newly create course version. If the program does not have a new version we assign the user to the existing course in VLS without versioning it.
Based on this logic, by simply updating and publishing the lesson to VLS, the next time a user who has no assignment opens the exam, VLS should version the course automatically and assign the user to it. All subsequent launches will assign users to that updated version as well, so that should resolve the issue moving forward, however you still have users assigned to the previous version that we need to deal with.
Users assigned to the previous version of the course who are in an incomplete state will either need to complete the exam in the previous version, or you can opt to move them to the new version. *However they will lose all progress and have to start over in the new version.
Users with an open, pass, or not pass state can be moved to the new version without repercussion.
Note that the logic that determines what event a user may be automatically enrolled in may create situations in which it is difficult to test or troubleshoot certain problems. For example, you may have enrolled a user in an External Event with certain properties (a particular sequence of objectives, a certain question pool, etc) and discover that you want to make changes to lesson. After making your changes and approving and publishing the edited lesson, you find that the learner still sees the old objective sequence, or the old questions. The likely cause is the first item in the logic noted above; Is the user enrolled in an event for an active course? If so, use that course. In other words, the learner has not been removed from the original version of the external course, and for that reason is seeing the old objectives sequence and questions. The solution is to move the learner from the old event and re-launch the course from the LMS.
When VISION creates External Courses, it uses settings pre-configured in the visionlearning.xml file, which resides in the webroot of the Learning Station or VISION Connect installation. Be aware of the various Exam Configuration settings in the visionlearning.xml file, particularly the following:
ExternalEventDefaultExams
ThreeStepExamExternal
