PeopleFluent is pleased to announce the PeopleFluent Learning 23.11 update. PeopleFluent Learning 23.11 was released for general availability on 8 November, 2023. If you are a hosted (SaaS) customer, please contact your PeopleFluent Customer Success Manager to request a schedule for upgrading your sites.
This documentation describes the functionality changes in PeopleFluent Learning 23.11, including new and deprecated features. If you have any questions about the enhancements or the new features, please contact your PeopleFluent representative.

A PDF version of the release notes is available with the PeopleFluent Learning 23.11 Supporting Documentation

Resolved Issues

PeopleFluent Learning 23.11 includes a number of bug-fixes and you are encouraged to review them in the Resolved Issues Report. This report can be found with the PeopleFluent Learning 23.11 Supporting Documentation

Summary of Enhancements

The features and enhancements described in this documentation apply to PeopleFluent Learning and will be available when the customer is upgraded to this version.

Because PeopleFluent Learning is configurable per customer, new features may affect each customer's individual implementation differently. For more information about any new feature, and how it can be used in specific implementations, contact your PeopleFluent representative.

This guide is not a tutorial, although some background explanation is provided for each of the key features to better appreciate how these might affect your organization.

The following new features are included in PeopleFluent Learning 23.11:

Exam Enhancements
- Record Post-Completion Attempts & Higher Scores
- Post-Exam Information Field
- Print Button Changes
- Configuration for Skipping Questions at Exam Level
- Partial Grading at Exam Level
- CSV Export Option: UTF-8 BOM
- Question Version Enhancements
AI Assistant Recommendation Improvements
- New Recommendation Focus Labels
- New Name for the Background Task
- Course Language
- Catalog Visibility
- Active Sessions
- Transcript Data/Minimum Enrollments Update
- User Data
- Widgets
Job Profile Competency Quota Enhancements
- Changes to the Job Profile Competency Quota Analysis Screen
- Changes to Job Profile Competency Quota Report (R140)
New Course Details Page
Additional Enhancements
- Clean-up AICC Communication for Proxy Launch Exams
- Configure Index Rebuild during Startup
- System Configuration for Question Pool Permissions
- System Configuration for Status for New Competencies and Job Profiles

Exam Enhancements

Record Post-Completion Attempts & Higher Scores

When an exam is completed (passed), learners can access the exam and answer questions, but those
answers are not recorded. New Exam settings will allow administrators to record additional answers, as well as allow a higher score to be recorded.

Record Post-Completion Attempts - This would enable recording the attempts in the appropriate
database tables (testinstance. testquestion#, etc).
Record Post-Completion Higher Score - This would allow the Exam score to be updated if the post-completion attempt has a higher score, but would not update if the attempt itself is not recorded.

To enable these settings:

In Exam Manager, open the appropriate exam or create a new exam.
On the Details screen, scroll to the Availability Properties section.
Enable one or both of the settings.

Post-Exam Information Field

In 23.11, we have added a new area in the Exam Results screen where organizations can display post-exam information. The text in this area can be used to provide feedback or further instructions to the learner.

Important: The text displayed on the Exam Results screen will be displayed for all users, regardless if they pass or fail the exam.

To add post-exam summary text:

In Exam Manager, open the appropriate Exam or create a new Exam.
On the Details screen, enter text in the Post Exam Information field. Note: The text will be included in a <p> tag with the CSS class "feedback." This allows the administrators to provide additional styling outside of the WYSIWYG editor (such as padding or adding a border).

Print Button Changes

When exams are configured to allow printing, a Print Review button displays on the landing page, when
launching a preview of the exam, as shown below:

Previously, there was an issue when the Exam was also configured to allow candidates to resume incomplete attempts. When both options were selected, launching the Exam and selecting the Print Preview button set the Exam attempt as incomplete. Therefore, when a learner would re-launch the Exam, the introductory page was bypassed and the learner would be taken straight to the exam without having opportunity to print again. In 23.11, we have added a new Exam configuration option that will allow learners unlimited opportunities to print the exam.

To enable this setting:

In Exam Manager, open the appropriate Exam or create a new Exam.
On the Details screen, scroll to the Availability Properties section.
Enable the Allow unlimited printing of exam... setting.

Configuration for Skipping Questions at the Exam Level

Previously, the ability for learners to skip Exam questions could only be set on the organization level with a System Configuration setting. In 23.11, we are providing the option to use the System Configuration setting or to override the system setting on the Exam level.

To configure this option:

In Exam Manager, open the appropriate Exam or create a new Exam.
On the Details screen, scroll to the Review Properties section.
Locate and configure the After each page of questions field.

- respect whatever is set on the organization level.
- To update the exam to behave differently than the organization-level setting, click Use this
  setting for this exam and then click the appropriate option below.

Partial Grading at Exam Level

Previously, the ability to grant partial credit on multiple choice questions could only be set on the organization level with a System Configuration setting. In 23.11, we are providing the option to use the System Configuration setting or to override the system setting on the Exam level.

To configure this option:

In Exam Manager, open the appropriate Exam or create a new Exam.
On the Details screen, scroll to the Grading Properties section.
Locate and configure the Check for missing answer(s) before continuing to the next page field.

- Use the System Configuration setting is enabled by default. If this is enabled, the exam will
  respect whatever is set on the organization level.
- To update the exam to behave differently than the organization-level setting, click Use this
  setting for this exam and then click the appropriate option below.

CSV Export Option: UTF-8 BOM

In 23.11, we have added a new System Configuration setting that allows CSV report exports to use UTF-8 BOM encoding. This is in response to issues with special UTF-8 characters, such as those from non-English languages. These characters do not display correctly in Microsoft Excel, as shown below.

The encoding needed to be changed to UTF-8 BOM in another program (Notepad ++, for example) and re-opened in Excel to display correctly. The new setting will allow the exports to be encoded in UTF-8 BOM, eliminating the need for this extra step.

To enable this setting:

Go to System > System Configuration.
In the Select a Category drop-down field, select System.
Locate the Export CSV using UTF-8 BOM encoding field and click the checkbox to enable the setting. This setting will apply to all reports, including Report Wizard reports, when CSV is selected as the output format.

Question Version Enhancements

PeopleFluent Recruiting provides the option to allow or disallow question versions. For reference:

This functionality is managed by the Question Approval setting. You can locate this setting by going to System Settings > System Configuration and selecting Exams in the Select a Category drop-down field.
The Only allow status changes that are consistent with approval workflow (Approval Mode) setting provides the ability for questions to have versions.
The Allow arbitrary status changes (Simple Mode) setting will not create new versions of existing questions.

Version Tracking when Answering All Question Types

Previously, only answers for single-choice, multiple-choice and true/false questions stored versions of the question being answered. In the 23.11 release, the remaining question types will track the version number as well. All newly created questions are stored in the database as Version 1. When Approval Mode is enabled for a question, and the question is approved, all subsequent updates will result in a new version being saved. The version number increments by 1 with each update (e.g. 2, 3, 4 …).

New Column in Complete Exam Question Response Listing Reports

Once there are version columns for all column types, the column will be added to the R308 Complete Exam Question Response Listing (one per row) and R308a Complete Exam Question Response Listing (Multiple Exams) reports.

Allow Question Version Changes via Question CSV Loader

The Question CSV Loader includes a version question that will now increment versions of questions for customers who use the Approval Mode configuration setting.

To increment, the following criteria must be met:

The Action column must be “U” for Updating the question.
The Version column must either be blank or a number that is one integer higher than the current version.

AI Assistant Recommendation Improvements

In 23.11, we have made several improvements to the AI Assistant Recommendation functionality.

Current Usage

Recommended Courses List Filters

Users can refine the recommended courses using the provided fields; Recommendation Focus, Courses to Consider and Display Limit.

Additional information about each field:

Recommendations Focus Field

Personal Preferences - the recommendations will be based on courses in the user's training history that were self-enrolled.
Job Related Suggestions - the recommendations will be based on courses in the user's history that were assigned (e.g. group enroll, auto-enroll,...).
Surprise Me - the recommendations will be based on all courses in the user's history, and since each course can have multiple associated courses, the assistant will use a probability function to vary the returned list instead of simply ranking the recommended courses and returning the highest-ranked courses (which is what happens with the first two options above). This means that this list can vary each time a "surprise me" request is made.

Note: The Recommendation Focus labels listed above will be updated in this release. Please see the Feature Enhancements section for additional information.

Courses to Consider Field

Consider ALL My Training - all courses in the user's history will be used in the analysis. This is the default case.
Consider Only Recently Completed Training (30 Days) - only courses completed in the past month will be used for the analysis.
<Individual Courses listed> - the remainder of the drop-down options will list individual courses in the user's history so that they can select an individual course for recommendations.

Display Limit Field

The number of recommendations returned is limited to the number selected in this field. Typically, these are returned in the order of relevance. The exception is the Surprise Me focus.

The Course List

Course titles in the list are linked to take the user to the corresponding catalog page. Recommendations are presented with a "star" rating, indicating the most relevant recommendations.

How are Recommendations Made?

Each course in the user's training history will result in retrieval of associated courses from two areas:

Courses explicitly configured by a Training Administrator using the Catalog Editor. These courses are assumed to be high quality and therefore receive a rating of 1.0 when assembling the recommendation list.
Courses ranked and associated with the source course by the background AI task that runs once per week. Each course may have an association rating between 0.0 and 1.0.

Note: It is possible that the user's current training history or selected course does not have sufficient information to warrant a recommendation. In this case a suitable message is presented to the user and no courses are returned.

The "Course Association Relevance Rating Task" Background Task

The background task that provides the "magic" of the recommendations runs once per week. This task implements a "Collaborative Filter" algorithm similar to that used on Amazon and Netflix, but tweaked for training relationships. It has a few details worth noting:

Since this task runs once per week, ratings will not change in between the runs.
The first time a site is upgraded with the appropriate build it might be a good idea manually run this task using the "Scheduled Tasks" menu function (so that you do not need to wait one week to use the recommendations).
The algorithm must do a massive analysis of existing training history (e.g. the transcript table) and to do this efficiently it reads the relevant details into memory and does the calculations in memory versus iterative SQL operations. This greatly improves on the speed (a typical analysis of a large database containing 5 million rows can be done in 5 minutes versus 10 hours). However, such an analysis can temporarily use 500MB-1GB of RAM, which is released once the analysis is finished and the results written to the database.
Several parameters currently limit the analysis of the training records. Essentially:
- Only the past 18 months of training data are analyzed. This has been set as the default because there does not seem to be much value in really old record associations and recommendations, and constraining the analysis shortens the analysis time considerably.
- Each course must have at least 10 enrollments to be considered for meaningful inclusion in the recommendations. Because of this approach, demo sites may have too little information for meaningful recommendations to be made, so it may be necessary to do some bulk enrollment actions to get the numbers high enough to provide data worth showing in a demo.

Note: The task name will be changed in the 23.11 release. Please see the Feature Enhancements section for additional information.

Setting Up a Site

The "AI Assistant Recommendations" menu items needs to be added to an existing skin for it to appear on the site. The navigations.xml would typically have an entry like the following added:

Feature Enhancements

New Recommendation Focus Labels

As noted above, there are three options to filter the AI Assistant Recommendations. The labels for these options have been changed to be more reflective of the actual functionality:

Personal Preferences has been changed to Self-Enrolled Courses
Job Related Suggestions has been changed to Assigned Courses
Surprise Me has been changed to Random Recommendations

New Name for Background Task

The background task has been changed from Course Association Relevance Rating Task to AI Assistant Recommendations Task to make it easier to identify when running the task.

Course Language

Previously, the courses only showed the primary language, and not any language bundles for the logged-in user’s language. This has been changed so courses with language bundles in the language selected by the logged-in user will display. Courses without language bundles in the selected language will display the primary language bundle. This is the same functionality as Catalog Browse and Catalog Search.

Catalog Visibility

Previously, all courses appeared, regardless of catalog permissions. This has been changed to only allow courses visible to the learner via Search or Browse to appear for Recommendations. These are courses that are configured to show in a catalog and assigned to catalogs that the user has permission to view.

Active Sessions

Classroom courses without active sessions will currently appear in results. There is an existing system configuration "Show the 'Only show items with active schedule(s)' option" that controls what appears in search results. This will also apply to the AI Assistant Recommendations.

If this is enabled, a new option will display allowing users to select whether or not to "Show only 'Active' sessions," which is the same functionality on the Search page.

Transcript Data/Minimum Enrollments Update

Previously, the background task analysis only reviewed the previous 18 months of transcripts. In addition, only courses with 10 or more enrollments were included. These parameters were fixed and not configurable. In 23.11, they are configurable via System Configuration.

Transcript history period (months) to use for AI Assistant Recommendations - manages the transcript history time frame. The field defaults to 18, with the minimum being 6.
Minimum enrollments per module for inclusion in the Course Association Relevance Rating Task - manages the minimum number of enrollments per module. This field defaults to 10, with the minimum being 5.

To configure these settings:

Go to System > System Settings.
In the Select a Category field, select Records/Transcript.
Locate the fields and configure them as necessary.

User Data

Previously, the system only looked at courses on the transcript, and was not associated with user metadata. A System Configuration has been added to determine which user data elements should allow transcript comparison.

The AI Recommendation Engine setting provides the following options:

Job Title - Courses based on skills associated with the user’s job title.
Organization Unit - Courses taken by other users within the same organization unit (based on the highest level visible for the user’s role).
User Groups - Courses taken by other users in the same user groups as the logged-in user.
Job Profiles - Courses based on the histories of users with the same job profile(s).
Competencies - Courses based on the histories of users with the same awarded, unexpired competencies.
Certifications - Courses based on the histories of users with the same certifications.

To configure the setting:

Go to System > System Settings.
In the Select a Category field, select Records/Transcript.
Locate the field and configure it as necessary.

The recommendation options have been added as filters in the Recommendation Focus field, as shown below.

Widgets

Widgets have been added to the Widget Page to display recommendations.

The course list displayed from the widget will show the same recommendations as the AI Assistant Recommendations page.

Job Profile Competency Quota Enhancements

Changes to the Job Profile Competency Quota Analysis Screen

Display Job Profile Group(s)

When running the Job Profile Competency Quota Analysis, you have the option to select Job Profile Groups as part of the analysis. As of 23.11, the selected Job Profile Groups are displayed at the top of the report, as shown below:

Job Profile Subheaders

As of 23.11, the Job Profile Quota Analysis screen will display a row identifying the Job Profile, allowing differentiation if there is more than one Job Profile selected, as shown below.

Color-Coded Quotas

To provide a quicker view of whether or not the quota for a given competency has been met, three new CSS classes have been added to allow color-coded results (red, yellow, green).

The classes can be added to skins to handle colors, so they can actually be any background color desired.

Add “class=quota-red” when the # With Competency < Competency Quota
Add “class=quota-yellow” when the # With Competency = Competency Quota
Add “class=quota-green” when the # With Competency > Competency Quota

User Column - Add Expiration Date

If the Competency has been awarded and has modules configured to be valid for a specific time frame (configured for a specific amount of time or has an expiration date) the end date is displayed below the proficiency, as shown below:

The display has two CSS classes for the date. One for plain text when the date is far in the future, and the second based on the competency “Renewal period” setting, which matches when the Learning Path page shows the competency as “At Risk”. This allows the skin to change the color as needed.

User Column - In Training Status

A new status of In Training will display for a user who has not been awarded a Competency, but has a transcript record for training associated with the Competency that is either not started or in process.

User Column - Add Links to Enroll User & Award Competency

As of 23.11, administrators have the ability to award a Competency or enroll a user in training from the user column. The links display in the column and, depending on the administrators permissions, the action can be taken directly from the column. Specifically:

Award the Competency link will appear based on the Review Competencies setting for the User Role.
Enroll User in Training link will be based on the Enroll Other Users setting for the User Role. The link will actually POST a form to the Enrollment Wizard functionality.

In the example below the icon is used to award the Competency and the icon is used to enroll the user in training. To allow this, the links will include different CSS classes to style using icons. The specific icons here are examples, and the actual icons will be designated in the CSS files within the skin.

Changes to Job Profile Competency Quota Report (R140)

Change to User Columns

The changes made to the Job Profile Competency Quota Analytics screen will be made to the report, including:

Expiration Date
In Training status

Select Job Profile in Workstation

The Report Selector screen has a new option for Job Profiles. The list of Job Profiles will only be those in the selected Job Profile Group(s).

New Course Details Page

The new Course Details page can be viewed from the Catalog Search and Catalog Browse screens. The new page has a more modern appearance and is more mobile-friendly.

Additional Enhancements

Clean-up AICC Communication for Proxy Launch Exams

When a module is configured to launch an exam, it can also be exported as a Proxy Launch Package that can be imported into another LMS. This allows PeopleFluent Learning to use AICC functionality to send applicable information to the other LMS. However, because launching an exam brings up a start page, there are changes that need to be made to account for this.

The changes are:

Sending lesson_status=incomplete when an exam starts.
Sending exit=suspend when abandoning an attempt in the middle and exit= without a value when the attempt completes (pass or fail).
Sending lesson_status=failed and a new lesson_status=incomplete when a user decides to start over instead of completing a previously abandoned attempt.

Configure Index Rebuild during Startup

Some customers have issues with the rebuilding process during startup. The change will add a startup configuration in the ekp.properties file for which index types (competency, jobprofile, reference_resource, learning_module, user, news, lo_session, transcript) are rebuilt during startup.

System Configuration for Question Pool Permissions

A new Question Pool Permission Inheritance System Configuration option has been added. When this setting is enabled, if a user has unrestricted permission of Parent question pool, that user is able to add, edit, or delete questions in any child pools. When the setting is not enabled, permissions on child pools must be explicitly set to allow access. This also means to allow access on a child pool, administrators must also allow access on all of the parent pools in that child pool’s hierarchy.

The System Configuration is applied on pages related to question pools like Questions List page, Question Editor, etc.