The Administrator's Interface - Genius CE & Enterprise

Introduction

In this article, we provide an overview of the user interface you are presented with when you log into Genius CE or Enterprise. We also describe how you can switch from the Administrator role to other roles that your user may have, allowing you to experience the platform from the point of view of a learner, instructor, or manager in your organization's learning initiative.

Logging into Genius CE & Enterprise as an Administrator

To log into Genius CE & Enterprise as an Administrator, type the URL of your organization's instance of Genius CE or Enterprise in your Web browser. In most cases, the address is <myorganization.geniussis.com>. When you do so, you will be presented with a login screen that will look more or less like this: 

Log in with your username and password or through SSO, if configured by your organization.

When you first log into Genius CE or Enterprise

When you first log into Genius CE or Enterprise as an Administrator, you will be presented with a screen that has tabs, a sidebar, the main content section, and the top bar, which contains a search box and a pull-down menu that displays the current role you are logged in under.

In this particular case, when you log into Genius CE or Enterprise as an Administrator, you are presented with a dashboard, which is configurable by any administrator. At first, you may not see anything here, but you can add any graphs or charts that are available.

Tabs

The tabs in the Genius CE & Enterprise Admin UI help you navigate through the different functions in the system. Genius CE & Enterprise are organized so that you can quickly perform the operations you need to manage your learning initiative.

 The tabs include: 

• Home - the first page you see when you log into Genius CE or Enterprise including the dashboards and visualizations that we mentioned earlier. 
• Message Center - A place to view and send communications through your Genius CE or Enterprise instance.
• Learners - where you can perform operations around your learners. The Learners tab is also used to communicate with your learners through the Automated Notifications features included with Genius CE & Enterprise. 
• Financials - Contains detailed ledger items with descriptions of the financials tracked by learners and affiliations in your instance.
• Enrollments - this tab provides you with a way to quickly find the users who are currently completing or who have already completed a section in your learning initiative.
• Affiliations - makes it possible to create new affiliations and access the tools required to modify an affiliation's basic information, as well as view lists and reports that are centered around specific affiliations. 
• Learning Paths - This tab is where you can create learning paths and view all the current and archived learning paths that are available in your organization's learning initiative. 
• Courses - this tab is used to perform operations with courses, including creating them both manually and in bulk. 
• Sections - once you have created courses, you have to make offerings of those courses that people can actually enroll into. These are sections. The configurations can change per offering, but the template and material stays the same.
• Instructors - allows you to perform operations with your instructors, including adding an instructor, editing an instructor's information, and searching for an instructor in your learning initiative. 
• Coaches - another way to provide help for your users, Coaches make it possible to assign a 'tutor' to a specific group of learners.
• Reports - provides access to all the built-in reports included with Genius CE & Enterprise, as well as the powerful Report Builder and SQL Query Builder that provide complete flexibility when it comes to creating reports in Genius CE & Enterprise. 
• Administration - where you can associate a user to an instructor or affiliation, change the access permissions for specific roles, and perform general configuration tasks for Genius CE & Enterprise.

By clicking on a tab, you can move from one dimension of your learning initiative to another. So, for example, you can click on the Learners tab to find a learner, edit his or her information and then enroll them in a section; and on the Sections tab to create a new section of an existing course. 

The Sidebar

The Sidebar's content will change as you click on each Tab. Below, we provide you with screenshots with the Sidebar for the Learners tab and the Administration tab. Compare the number of menu items in each sidebar for the Learners tab vs. the Administration tab:

The Sidebar is where you will find the operations you can perform in each tab. So, for example, the Learner's tab has menu items to add learners, edit learners, etc. - while the Courses tab has menu items to create courses, edit courses, etc. 

This means that when you are looking to perform an operation in Genius CE & Enterprise, always look in the sidebars first.  

Clicking on the topmost item in the Sidebar will always return you to the main page in that Sidebar's Tab. The main page in the Sidebar is the first page you are presented with when you click the Tabs in the Genius CE & Enterprise Administrator's interfaces. 

Main Content 

To the right of the Sidebar, you will find the Main Content section. The contents of this screen will vary depending on the tab and the operation you are currently performing. There are two special mentions in this section - the Home tab and the Management tab. Clicking on the Home tab will present you with the Dashboard you first saw when you logged into the platform:

On the other hand, clicking on the Management tab will present you with a different Dashboard that you can use to manage your learning initiative. 

The Management tab does not have a sidebar, as this screen is used only to present data about progress, performance, and engagement across your entire learning initiative through interactive visualizations. 

The Top Bar

The 'top bar' is the section of the Admin Knowledge Base that shows you the username that you are logged under, a Search Box, and finally, the ability to switch roles at any time while you are logged into Genius CE or Enterprise. We provide additional details about each one of these sections below: 

Search Box

Genius CE & Enterprise provides Administrators with a Search Box that allows you to quickly perform operations. For example, you can type a learner's name in that search box, and Genius CE & Enterprise will return a list of all the learners who share that name: 

The Search box finds 'input' items in Genius CE & Enterprise and does not search through the solution's UI. This means that you can search for courses, sections, learners, instructors, managers, and fellow administrators: all concrete data objects that you, as an Administrator have created as you have made use of Genius CE & Enterprise. This saves a lot of time and many clicks browsing through tabs to get the information you require. 

Genius CE & Enterprise will provide you with a clickable results list showing all the hits that your search term returned, as well as a table showing you the nature of the hits (for example, are they courses, sections, or learners?)

This makes it possible for you to quickly find the objects you want to work on - for example, you can quickly find a learner and then move to enroll him or her in a section - all without having to click on the Learners or Enrollments tab in the first place. 

Switching to a different role 

As an Administrator, you may find yourself in a situation where a single user may have multiple roles in your learning initiative. For example, instructors in an organizational learning environment may be learners in some courses, and instructors in others. This may also be the case for Managers, who may have responsibilities to manage a group of users under an Affiliation and who may also be learners themselves. 

You can quickly understand the current role in which you have logged into the system through the Current Role pull-down menu in the top right-hand corner of Genius CE or Enterprise. By clicking on this menu, you can switch between all the roles available to you as a user. 

We highly recommend that you, as an Administrator, set your user to be all roles available in your system. That way, you can quickly switch to a different role and experience the solution from the perspective of each and every role you have available in your learning initiative. 

The Home Tab

The Home tab is the first thing users see when they log in. It provides a portal or dashboard tailored to the user's role in Genius CE or Enterprise. This dashboard can be customized with reports that are most relevant to a particular user.  Data in the reports can be automatically filtered based on the affiliation the user belongs to, so they can't see data based on users outside of their affiliation. 

Default dashboards by role can be set up under Administration->Customize Dashboard.  You determine what reports appear on each role’s dashboard.  You can also determine whether a user can personalize their default role-based dashboard.