Planning and Scheduling

Overview

You can create assignment instances manually, from the Create Assignment and the Add assignment instances forms, or you can let Nifty do the work for you.

There are two ways with which you can tell the platform to do this automatically:

• Based on the learning activity, by specifying a list of learning events that should trigger the creation process - planning
• At a certain point in time, by setting a specific date when the instance should be created - scheduling

Rules and Planning

If you want a learning assignment instance to be created when something happens to a learner, a Learning Event in Nifty Speech, you will have to make use of assignation rules and planned instances.

The following flow can be used to describe the process of dynamically creating a learning assignment instance:

1. A rule is added to a learning assignment.
2. The rule tells Nifty that, when applied over a learner, a planned instance should be created for that employee.
3. Once the planned instance gets created every learning event generated by the targeted learner will trigger in Nifty a validation process. The platform will look for matches between the events and the conditions described during the rule creation process.
4. When all conditions get matched Nifty checks if the assignment instance needs to be created right away or with a time offset.

• in the first case the assignment instance for that learner will be created immediately and the planned instance status will change to Created
• if an offset was specified the planned instance status will change to Scheduled and the assignment instance will be created at a later date

Assignation Rules

A rule describes a series of events that need to happen in order for a learner to receive an assignment.

Rules can be created from the Learning Assignment View Page. You can go to the Assignation Rules card and click on the add button icon. A new form will appear where you can add multiple rules at the same time. The form fields are explained in the following paragraphs.

Templates

Nifty provides you from the get-go with a series of practical rule templates that make it easier to apply certain use cases to your assignments. This way you can get the benefit of rules without having to manually set events and conditions. Each template covers a certain point in the learning process that might be used to create a learning assignment instance.

Rule Name

To make it easier to recognize your rules after you have created them you can set custom names that describe what is their use.

Assignation Offset

By default, when a planned instance gets matched, a learning assignment instance will be created right away. In some cases you might want to delay when this should happen by setting a custom time offset. This offset will make it so that, when the planned instance is matched, its status will be changed to scheduled and the schedule date will be calculated based on the field that you have set. The learning assignment instance will then be created at that point in time.

Planned Instances Limit

In some cases you might want to limit the number of times a rule can be applied for one learner. This way you restrict how many planned instances can be created, from a rule, for that person.

For example, let's go with an assignment that gets assigned to specific dynamic group. This assignment has an auto assign (Learner Joined Audience) rule and the planned instances limit is set to 1.

• A learner joins the company and is created in Nifty
• The learner is now part of mentioned dynamic group that is used in our assignment audience
• A planned instance gets created based on the auto assign rule that we have set
• The Learner Joined Audience event gets generated and our planned instance gets resolved (a learning assignment instance is created)
• The same learner changes their department because of some business requirements
• After some time the learner returns to their previous job role
• The same process of creating planned instances based on rules will start again
• This time Nifty will not create the planned instance for this learner because of the limit that we have previously set

Planned Instances

A planned instance tells you that a learning item will be assigned to a learner when some events will happen or at a specific point in time. Like most other resources in Nifty statuses are used to describe the state of a planned instance.

Statuses

• Planned

This status indicates that an assignment instance is set to be automatically created following the occurrence of predefined learning events. It is the default status assigned to a planned instance once a relevant rule is applied.

• Scheduled

The status describes that assignment instances will be created at a specific point in time. A previously created planned instance can end up with this status if the rule used had a custom Assignation Offset set. At the same time users can also manually create planned instances with the status Scheduled from Schedule Assignment Instances form.

• Created

The final status of a planned instance. In this state the learning assignment instance has been created.

Manually resolving planned instances

In case you need to force the creation of assignment instances you can do this from the Planned Instances card.

1. Go to the Planned Instances card, on the Learning Assignment View page.
2. Select the rows that you want to resolve.
3. Click on the Resolve button and a confirmation modal will appear.
4. After your confirmation the table will update with the new data and the assignment instances will get created.

Scheduling

Learning assignment instances can also be created at a specific point in time. This is signaled in Nifty by a planned instance that has the status Scheduled.

You can schedule the creation of assignment instances manually or planned instances that were created from rules can end up with the status Scheduled if the Assignation Offset field was previously set.

Manual Scheduling

1. Go to the Planned Instances card, on the Learning Assignment View page
2. Click on the add button icon, in the top right corner of the card
3. The Schedule Assignment Instances form will appear
4. From here you can specify the learners that will receive the new instances and when should those be created
5. After clicking the Submit button, new planned instances, with the status Scheduled, will appear in the card table

Rescheduling

If there's a change of plans and you need to reprogram when an assignment instance should be created you can do that from the Planned Instances card.

1. Go to the Planned Instances card, on the Learning Assignment View page
2. Select the rows that you want to reschedule. This will only work for rows that have the status Scheduled
3. Click on the Change Schedule Date button and a new form will appear
4. From there select the new date that you want to use and submit the form
5. The table will update with the new data and the instances will get created when the new schedule date will be reached.