Limiting access to Tahoe courses based on user groups

Course Access Groups are available on the Tahoe Pro and Premium plans, They enable you to offer a different course catalog to different user groups. For example:  

  • You have some courses on your site that are for internal employees only, and others that are for public access 
  • You sell packages of courses to different customers, and want them to see the only courses their organization has purchased when they register on your site 
  • You do purely internal training, and have groups of employees who need access to different training materials - such as engineering, sales and marketing courses

There's near-limitless options for different combinations and uses for this powerful feature, and knowing our customers you're probably thinking of your own use case already! So let's jump into how you set it up.  

Enable course access groups 

The first thing to do with course access groups (once you've decided on how to use them) is to enable them on your Tahoe site. Log into your Tahoe management console and you'll see the Course Access Groups menu. Click on that tab and make sure Enable Course Access Groups is selected. Once it's clicked, you'll get all the options for setting up your course access groups.

 TWO IMPORTANT POINTS:

  • When you enable Course access groups, all of your existing courses will be hidden until you assign visibility rules to your courses. So make sure you check your catalog from testing learner accounts once you're done!
  • Any new courses you create will default to NOT visible. When your course is ready for launch, be sure to either assign it to a group or set it visible to all learners, whichever fits your needs. 

Create your groups

By clicking the Add a new course access group button, you can start populating your site with groups. This is an easy task - just give them an easily identifiable name and write yourself a solid description of who goes in that group, and then click Create group.

Please note that a user can only be a part of one course access group at a time So if we wanted to offer the Customers group our External Users course catalog as well as our special Customer-only catalog, we'd need to handle that in our course management settings.

Before we go into that, let's add an auto-assignment rule. As we're doing configuration for the Appsembler Academy, we want to automatically assign anyone with an Appsembler email address to our Internal Users group. To do that we scroll down to Your active rules and click Add a new rule.

As the text here suggests, this auto assignment rule only applies to newly registered accounts, so if you already have learners in your platform, you may need to assign them manually. So we create our rule, give it a snappy title, and click  Create Rule.

Now anyone who registers is part of that group!

Assign your courses to groups

Remember, when we enabled course access groups, we disabled all of our courses from appearing for any users. Now we need to add them back in. If you head into the  Courses Management tab, you'll see a list of all of your courses.

From here, you can do two main things. First, you can make a course visible to all learners and ignore course access groups entirely by clicking the toggle button next to Visible to all learners. Use this for content you want visible to everyone, regardless of their group. 

Next, we'll assign courses to specific groups. This is where we can associate multiple groups to the same content. In this example, we're saying that Appsembler customers can have access to all of our externally accessible content, but also have access to special customer-only courses. That looks a little something like this:


You just keep clicking  Assign another group and pick which of your previously defined groups can access which of your courses.

From now on, anyone assigned to those groups will have access to the courses you've chosen for them and no others. But how do we assign existing learners to courses? Hop over to our article Assigning users to Tahoe course access groups if you want to check it out.

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