Face-to-face Activity

Owned by Luc Richard
Sept 15, 2020
2 min read

The face-to-face activity is an course-level activity that allows you to schedule classroom sessions, track attendance, manage waiting lists, and generate reports on your learners' participation and progress in courses. This is one of Dual Code's most popular plugins, and rightfully so given all the advantages it provides you.

Advantages of the Face-to-face Activity

Leveraging the Face-to-face activity offers many advantages over creating one course for each classroom session.

  • Reporting. Having all sessions in one (1) course instead of having the information stored in multiple courses allows you to quickly identify who has completed the course. Because all the learners are registered in the same course, you can download the "Activity Completion" or "Course Completion" reports and easily track the participation and progress of each learner in one (1) report. This is especially important when an organization needs to produce a report for audit purposes to demonstrate that all their staff have taken a course.

  • Programs. Programs allow you to define a learning plan and specify which courses are mandatory for a group of learners based on their job title, department, or other criteria. Having a single course (with multiple sessions in it) allows you to add the course to program. The program will automatically enroll the learner in the course, yet it gives each learner the flexibility to select which date they would prefer to attend.

  • Standardization. Adding a course requires that instructors specify the name of the course, its ID, description, learning objectives, registration method, and so on. Duplication this information course after course may lead to inconsistencies. Leveraging the "Face-to-face" activity eliminates these inconsistencies because all the instructor needs to add for each session is a location, date/time and the number of seats available.

  • Course catalogue.  If a session is given once a week, adding one course per session means that within a year, you'd have 52 copies of the exact same course in your course catalogue. Multiply that by even only 5 courses means that your course catalogue after 1 year would contain, at a minimum, 260 courses. This makes it difficulty for your learners (and instructors) to find courses in the catalogue as they have to filter through a large list. Leveraging the "Face-to-face" activity means that the course appears only once in the catalogue, making the user experience much more friendly.

  • Simplification. Adding session dates is much simpler (and faster) than adding new courses. All instructors need to do is add the date/time of the session, the number of seats available, and usually the location of the course. This takes approximately 30 seconds (versus the 5-10 minutes that is required to add a new course and set the registration options). Aside from time-saving benefits, the "Face-to-face" activity automatically manages other aspects of classroom sessions, including:

    • Adding the session to their calendar

    • Sending reminders to learners who have registered for a session

    • Notifying learners via email when a session is cancelled

    • Managing wait-lists and manager approval

For more information on how this plugin works, please read Managing Classroom Sessions.