News story

Eurekos launches it's most major release yet

02 Nov 2021Learning NewsEurekos

Release 10 is a major release for Eurekos, representing 1642 improvements and new features and more than 20,300 hours in efforts to provide the best training solution for extended enterprise and professional training academies.

This has been made possible largely to the brilliant feedback we receive from our customers.

We have invested massively in great user experience and an even more flexible structure and control of learning journeys.

While we added more features, we also successfully made it more simple for administrators and easier for participants. This is why we named it Balance.

New Learn mode

• Course structure always shows. The mandatory in-page navigation is removed. You can now simplify your layout choices on the first page and unit pages, if you still need them, at all.
• The previous/next navigation items are “sticky” and stays on screen without having to scroll for them.
• Content creators will have a new option to preview pages as participant.
• Course title is incorporated as part of the course header on any page.

Courses I attend

This improvement has major impact on the dashboard and overall usability. The course list now offer various ways to support the new compliance features with relevant notifications and filters. It gives better control on what the participant wish to focus on and intelligently shows filtration and search options, when these are needed.

All users are offered various ways to filter completed, in-progress, deadlines and recertifications by various criteria to keep focus on what’s important.

It is also possible to manually hide and remove courses you don’t want to show on the list.

Single-click access to free courses

Simplified enrollment flow for free courses. When courses are free, users can skip straight to the course, from the course description page and avoid any additional forms or requests for information. This also applies if they are free due to organisational discounts and vouchers.

• Self-enrollment to free courses has been reduced to 1 click.
• Prices can be completed removed, not even showing “Free”.

Reimagined Manager dashboard with multiple new features

The Manager dashboard has been reinvented to support all the new statistics features and now supports multiple hierarchies in organisations.

A Manager can view progress by training and people, whichever makes more sense to get a full status view per course or participants and their compliance. The dashboard has been completely redesigned to provide all vital information at-a-glance. Details are available for each person in an easy access overlay.

• Not started is a new status indicator for participants who have not accessed the course materials yet.
• Expiry dates and registration dates for monitoring progress boundaries.
• Reports include additional metrics and status for audit purposes.

New filter options with additional filtration options which makes it easy to compare KPI requirements and compliance.

Invitations now include email options, which will allow any user to receive a signup request to the Manager’s organization and complete their credentials themselves, with minimum work for the manager.

Important fact: Invitations, when activated will allow sign-up into an organization, even if sign-up for unregistered users is not available. This is a very strong feature, which will allow a secure registration flow of external users, only through other registered users and in this case, only the registered security role of manager.

Organisations

Hierarchies in Organisations
Organisations support hierarchical layers for your entire channel or department structure, if used internally. There is no theoretical limit to the number of hierarchies you can create, but 10 levels is a practical restriction, which should just about twice what even global organisations with full channels would require.

Rule based user user management
One of the main issues with global channels and perhaps even external and decentralised user management is the administration of organisational relations. Users sign up and how do you know who they are and if they should even be allowed to sign up? With this release you can apply email masking to assign users to the right organisation automatically.

Email masking lets you define any number of domain-related identifiers and tie these to organisations. When a user signs up using e.g.: @company-x.com, you have already defined where this user belongs. And you can move any users who are not signing up from authorised organisations into a pending status until you have vetted them. This way, you can keep competition out.

Organisational support of corporate agreements
You can assign a license limit to an organisation, meaning that only a specific number of users will be able to sign up from the organisation.

• Each organisation to have own sign-up screen, so users are registered within appropriate organisation.
• Users can self-connect to an organization on sign-up based on a certain “Email mask” and pending status option.
• Export of organisations.

More granular progress calculation

Progress on training is now much more granular. No more skipping through pages. Completion is based on results from all course page elements – e.g.: videos and having attempted all interactive elements on pages. Participants will only get a 100% progress, if everything has been visited.

• Statistics register progress with completed/uncompleted traffic lights on individual objects.
• Uncompleted learning objects will have direct links to take participants to pages they are on.

The enhanced progress applies to content built using the native authoring interface and also counts embedded SCORM packages as separate elements.

Completed training acknowledgement

Participants are visually confirmed that a training has been completed and is directed back to the user’s overview with other available trainings. Completion criteria are acknowledgement through 3 different actions, whichever happens first:

• End Date and time of the training. If your training has an end date, it ends no matter how far the individual progress is.
• Certificate has been issued. This can be based on any available criteria as defined through the certificate – e.g.: passing a quiz. See the separate section on this.
• All content has been consumed – i.e.: pages, videos and other learning objects, taking advantage of the extended granularity on progress.

Between the 3 options, most imaginable scenarios are managed automatically.

Automated training feedback

Automated feedback makes administration of the training feedback much easier. You no longer have to insert a feedback button in your courses. This is now an automated prompt, initiated by course completion. 3 different scenarios can trigger this event:

1. When the course end date is met.
2. When a certificate has been triggered, by any available certificate circumstance – e.g.: Instructor process, quiz passed, % content completed, or video(s) watched.
3. When the content has been 100% consumed, when no certification requirement is attached.

Additionally, you can create automated reminders when training feedback surveys has not been answered by participants. Repetitive reminders are possible.

Certificates can be restricted, to be issued only upon completing the training feedback.

Course administration

Massive expansion of the course administration feature set gives better control of complex learning journeys and process flows.

• Organisation has been added to training activities.
• Activities can be restricted (test, video, course completion, certificate, date).
• Ability to check if location is booked while creating activity.
• Mandatory courses
• Manager Approval
• Self-management: Allow participants to reassign themselves to other date options for the training.
• Extension of individual access of expired courses.

Multiple catalogues and course relations Organizational restrictions has been moved into the right structural place, in the training activities themselves. This allow you to create multiple different distributions of the same course with much greater ease and granular control, when used in combination with other features. Training activity restrictions Restrictions between course modules has been structurally redesigned and moved into the training activities. This enables a much more scalable approach to manage pre-requisites/restrictions between individual course modules and programs. New options have been added, to accommodate a typical case:

• Restrict a module through a test from a previous module.
• Restrict a module through watched video, as a requirement.
• Restrict a module through previous module course completion.
• Restrict a module through having received a previous certification.
• Restrict a module through fixed date, variable dates before or after course start or completion to support dynamic and rolling training iterations.

Additionally, expiry options for courses and programs have been additionally extended:

• Access expiration at the time of course start/end/enrollment.
• Days after course start/end/enrollment.
• Months after course start/end/enrollment.
• Specific date and time.

Expect to see additional options in future releases to support even more use cases and user journeys. Room and location availability A new option to see availability will open a calendar view with location, room and time availability. This let you plan and schedule training like a breeze if you manage this through the interface. Manager approval Manager approval can now be set on each training activity, as required. A workflow with email notifications to everyone involved to support a smooth flow of approval and rejection, has been implemented. In addition to the Manager (system role), also individual emails can be used for arbitrary approval processes – e.g. a specific person in your organization responsible for this training event. Self-management and cancellation If you wish to allow self-management, registrants will now be able to manage their own registrations in 2 ways:

• Cancel a registration directly from the course or their confirmation of enrollment.
• Reassign themselves to a new date, if the training they have enrolled to, have multiple date options. This feature respect any configuration of “last cancellation” that has been set up.

Extension of expiry You are configuring expiry of access to courses for a good reason, but sometimes you need to extend the access for a single individual for other good reasons. We have made this easier for you to do this with a dedicated extension function, which allow you to prolong access to specific persons on the sign-up list.

Administrative audit log Any changes to the administrative part of course management is now supported by downloadable audit logs. You can follow changes to any feature change by type and date and track down issues.

Course versioning

Course versioning is a formalised and automatic way of keeping track of course updates. You will find this feature on the “more” option when you are author or co-author of a course.

• Every change creates a new 1.x with automatic information on changes. This is a sub-version, indicating small changes.
• Authors have the ability to make a comment with changes for other authors and auditing purposes.
• Whenever a material change to a course is needed, use the “New version” to create a new major version (2.x, 3.x, etc.), which will clone your course and apply the new version number.

Version numbers are shown on course lists, on training assignment in activities and on reports to identify which version of a course a participant has been certified in. This is crucial for audit purposes and for determining when clients or staff need to get a recertification – e.g., when material changes requires this. And for this, you can use mass assignment to get it done.

Reporting

• Training statistics report extended with organization filter option along with the extension of the organisational hierarchies.
• Extension of general training statistics have been massively extended. Additional fields on expiry date, progress percentage, course metric details, attendance and webinar recordings viewed and more have been added.
• Course evaluation report can be performed by multiple select and date intervals on activity, course and survey filtration level
• Training survey to be non-anonymous. Previously, training surveys were always anonymous, but this is now a choice, and both can be applied as required.
• The User list enables individual and bulk operations for downloading PDF transcripts for all administrators.

Additional 3rd party integrations

• Zoom integration as webinar and online conference provider.
• Cybersource payment provider. Cybersource can be used for online payments via credit cards.
• TriCat virtual classroom tool integration. TriCat is an avatar enabled conferencing solution which allows conferencing and product demonstrations in a 3D space.

GDPR compliance automation

This is an added feature to the already exceptional GDPR support and anonymization, etc.

Configuration to auto-delete users who have not logged in a number of days after sign-up. This will clean up sign-ups that were not serious or for other reasons, even malicious ones, never managed to log in. This is defaulted to 24 hours and you will not have to take any action.

UI/UX updates:

• Video preview on dashboard/catalogue for the course banner.
• Minimised sidebar with always showing icons & platform header
• Course builder design update. Accommodates new restriction options.
• General purchase standardisation – this also includes improved flow and UI updates.
• Style updates on archives, video and H5P lists.
• Calendar events design update – creation and lists.
• Announcements design update – creation and lists with icons and improved dashboard appearance.
• H5P font and colour alignment, following general system configurations.
• More appearance and colour scheme options on page backgrounds and more.
• General links with underline option.
• Pages for anonyms (Login/Signup/Forgot pass/Errors) design update.
• Subtitles are more responsive.
• Platform level support of custom font.
• Certificate & automated email workflow text editor and tokens style update.
• Success/notice/error messages style update.
• Drag and drop/copy-paste content from outside into archives and file pickers

Other enhancement notes:

• PDF watermarking for automatic licensing information on PDF downloads with dynamic tokens.
• Automatic notification about webinar recording in webinar.
• Announcements can be expired to allow automatic clean-up.
• Announcements for all users with specific country, language.
• Platform commerce settings simplification.
• Ability to use custom order confirmation PDF template.
• SCORM launch option on courses: launch without course description page option
• Signup configuration can be disabled for unregistered users while still showing the course offerings.
• Calendar in Eurekos Teams now have all webinar providers as options.
• Microsoft Teams video conference link integration on both activity and event level.
• Allow changing event type/meeting URL on edit form.
• Extended reports for surveys with extra information.
• Surveys are no longer mandatory on activity forms.
• Updated PayPal library (preparation to support refunds).
• Enhanced QR code for anonyms with copy link option.
• Extension of date formats to support US and Asian standards. (MAYBE)
• Language translations to support excel export/import.
• Copy link option to make it easy to insert streaming videos into H5P objects such as interactive video.
• In the course builder, “Hide in navigation” has been removed as option, replaced by “Hide for participants”, hidden pages now reflected in analytics for participants.

Security:

• Penetration test completed by 3rd party.
• Revised scopes for connecting Microsoft account (Privacy by design optimisation)
• Specific cases of restricting access to archives with direct links.
• Additional improvements on XSS injections.
• Temporary files access restrictions prevented.
• NPM Packages disclosure vulnerability closed.
• General SSL/TLS update to 1.3

Api Extension:

The API has been expanded considerably to allow for course content exchange, page widgets and course assets from archives to be accessible. The API is expanded in relation to the upcoming mobile App.

Performance project:

Ongoing performance brings better overall performance on the services. This also includes aggregation of scripts, removing absolute functions and libraries and new system architecture improvements.

When is release 10 available?

Release 10 is available from October 29th, 2021.