Creating Prescriptive Rules - Genius CE & Enterprise

Introduction

Prescriptive Rules in Genius CE & Enterprise are designed to help you automate enrollments within the system. Through Prescriptive Rules, you can create rules to enroll learners into both courses and learning paths. 

Some use cases for the Prescriptive Rules feature include:

• Enrolling all learners in your Genius instance into a newly created section
• Enrolling a selected group of learners (affiliation) into a learning path on an ongoing basis
• Enrolling new learners/employees into an 'onboarding' learning path
• Enrolling a specific group of learners in specialized training
• Enrolling all employees who have a specific position, title, or classification into a particular course or learning pathway

Before you begin...

Some important considerations to keep in mind when using the Prescriptive Rules tool in Genius CE & Enterprise:

• Prescriptive Rules is an Admin-level feature. This means that to access this feature, the user must have access to the Administration > Recurring Jobs > Prescriptive Rules page.
• The section or learning path for the enrollment should already exist in the system, AND it should be available to learners based on their Affiliation.
• A common property to group learners should be identified and available (ask a question: “How do I identify those who need training?”)

Creating a new Prescriptive Rule

Access the Prescriptive Rules page from the Administration menu. This will show all rules that have been created in the past. At the top of the screen on the left, locate the link that reads “Add new rule”. 

Click on the “Add new rule” link to open the pop-up menu, which displays the filters for creating and defining a new rule. To create a rule, you will need to complete three steps, each of which we describe in detail below:

1. Fill out the required information
2. Set up filters
3. Choose the section or learning path for enrollment

Adding Basic Information:

The Basic information block contains some required information for the rule:

• Name – the name of the rule to be displayed, something short and descriptive.
• Description – a longer explanation of the rule.
• Schedule rule – set up the schedule for the rule to run once (manually), daily (once a day), or weekly (once a week);
• Start date – the date when the rule should start triggering, e.g., a specific date in the past or future to set up the frequency.

Applying Filters

In the Genius CE & Enterprise Prescriptive Rules model, Filters are the rules or conditions that are based on specific properties, defining how the system will find, sort, and filter the required audience.

This is an essential step in the setup: if the learner does not have the common identifying characteristics, then the system will NOT be able to find and group them. The filters can be set up before the values are added to the profile or affiliation, but the rule will not take effect until those values are added. 

1. The first step is to select the property:
   • Learner properties – all information that resides in the learner profile, such as their name, affiliation, email, etc. Additional properties can be added by navigating to Administration > Custom Fields > Learner. Once added, these will also appear in the filter, starting with LEARNER_CUST.NewFieldName. Some examples are position, classification, license,  and company.
     NOTE: When the new field is added, it may take up to 24 hours for the filter to appear in the prescriptive rules filter.
   • User properties – if the account created does not have a learner role, then it’s considered a user. These can include admins, instructors, managers, and learners with or without the learner role.
   • Affiliation property – the org structure name or custom fields.
2. The second step is to define the logic by selecting the appropriate operator: is, contains, is not, does not contain, starts with, ends with, more than, less than, after, before, in, and not in.
3. The third step is to define the value and click “Add Filter”.

Examples of use cases:

Task 1: To select all the existing and future learners who belong to the administration (a member of the Administrative Services Division or Accounting-Administration) and enroll them into the Administrative Resources section.

Setup: 

1. Click “Add new rule” and fill out the required information
2. Choose property called [AFFILIATION_NAMES] (‘Affiliation’ in pre 2.x)
3. Select operator “Contains”
4. Type the value “Admin” and click ‘Add Filter’
5. Select the radio button for ‘Section’ and mark the checkbox next to the needed section.
6. Save changes.

Once the changes are saved, the preview will show the affected learners.

Task 2. Select all the existing and future learners with the Service Engineer Classification and enroll them into a learning path called “Components of the company’s infrastructure.”

Setup: 

1. Click “Add new rule” and fill out the required information
2. Choose a custom property called [LEARNER_CUST.CLASSIFICATION] (‘Classification’ in pre 2.x)
3. Select operator “is”
4. Type the value “Service Engineer” and click ‘Add Filter’
5. Select the radio button for ‘Learning Path’ and tick the checkbox next to the needed section.
6. Save changes.

Important: All properties are treated as AND, so if the goal is to combine all Solution Engineers and Software Developers, you may create two separate rules or use the ‘in’ operator, separated by commas.

Task 3 Example: Enroll all (existing and new) Solution Engineers and Software Developers into the section called “Effective Communication 2019”

Setup: 

1. Click “Add new rule” and fill out the required information
2. Choose custom property called [LEARNER_CUST.CAREER_SERVICE]
3. Select operator “in”
4. Type the values 'Solutions Engineer' and' Software Developer', separated by commas, and maintain the single quotes around the values. Click ‘Add Filter’
5. Select the radio button for ‘Section’ and tick the checkbox next to the needed section.
6. Save changes.

For this rule to work correctly, all learners must have the property' Career Service 'populated with the corresponding value of  Solutions Engineer 'or 'Software Developer'. The naming has to be precise.

Enroll in – allows you to select from the available sections or learning paths. Multiple selection is allowed for both the section and the learning path.

Save changes once all the items are in place. A preview of the affected learners will help you verify that the filtering has been set up correctly.

All the created rules will be listed in the system:

• Edit - allows you to modify an existing rule;
• Execute (Play) - will start the process manually.
• Person - allows a preview of the learners who will be affected by the rule. For the best results, create at least one account that matches the filter. If the learners' list is empty, then verify the logic of the rule or inspect the values for typos.
• Name - shows the given rule name.
• Description - provides any explanation of the rule added by the creator.
• Schedule - shows the frequency of the rule execution.
• Status - shows the rule readiness (ready, running).
• Date/time stamp (there are two columns) - demonstrate the last time the rule was executed and the next scheduled runtime.
• Execution log - displays the results of the last run (success, failure, or details).