Create a great welcome with your academy homepage, the overview page of courses and workshops, your library. In this post, we show you how to design different individualized pages – so called portals – and give your learners a pleasant start into their learning journey. Here’s a step by step guide on how to set up portals, widgets, and more.

Set up portals and widgets

Formerly known as “homepage”, the overview of courses and workshops is your (company’s) entry level into your academy and training. We have made this page a lot more adjustable, so you can give your participants a personalized entry into learning. And that’s not all! By creating different portals, you can have multiple overview pages for different learning contents. You can edit portal by means of widgets. Let’s dive right into the creation!

By clicking on your profile picture in the top right-hand corner, you can access the setup for your academy as usual in the drop-down menu. Under Pages you will find the new item Portals. There you can create widgets. A widget is an area of the portal that displays courses or other content selected for different target groups. For example, a widget can only display content in a specific language. It is also possible to display courses or news for certain groups of participants only.

Create new portals

Here you can now create one or more portals, edit or delete them, and define which contents are displayed. Begin by adding a name for your new portal and click the “Add” button.

Click on “Edit” to adjust the settings and content of each portal.
You can edit the title you chose in the step before, adjust the menu label, select whether the portal is visible for specific groups within the academy, all members of the academy or is a public one.
Like pages, portals can be added to the main navigation and widgets.
In the next step, you can add widgets.

Create new widgets

Create one or more widgets and define which contents are displayed. To create a new widget, click on the button “Add widget”. First select from the drop-down menu whether the widget should contain courses, programs, pages, or a hand-picked selection (this can also be a combination of different content types), or an RSS feed.

The widgets can also be adjusted later on by using the “Edit” button. Widgets that you no longer need can be removed using the “Delete” button.

Define contents of the widgets

When creating a new widget or after clicking on “Edit” you will be directed to the setup of filters for the respective widget.

Overview widget types

• Courses
• Programs
• Pages
• Hand-picked selection
• New: RSS feed

• Courses

Optionally filter the included courses by one or more criteria:

• Under “Role” you can filter which role academy members should have in order to see the course selection of the widget. Select one or more of the following options here:
• Participant
• Trainer
• Auditor
• Author
• Assistent
• Not enrolled
• Additionally, filter by the completion status of the course. For participants choose from the following options:
• Completed
• Not completed
• Either
• Filter by type:
• Course
• Workshop
• You can additionally filter according to categories you have created in your academy. You can choose one or more categories.
• You also have the option of limiting the display to courses in certain languages. Here you can select all the languages to be included in the widget.
• In the dropdown menu under “Sort by” you have the possibility to set the order in which the courses should appear within the widget on the portal. Choose between:
• Name
• Date started
• Date completed
• Last visit

• Programs

Widgets can of course also contain course programs. These options are available to you here:

• Filter by categories that you have created in your academy. You can select one or more categories.
• In the dropdown menu under “Sort by” you have the possibility to set the order in which the programs should appear on the homepage. Choose between:
• Name
• Date started
• Date created
• Date modified

• Pages

You can also display pages that contain, for example, a cheat sheet in widgets. The following filters are available here:

• Filter by categories that you have created in your academy. You can select one or more categories.
• You also have the option of limiting the display to pages in certain languages. Here you can select all the languages to be included in the widget
• In the dropdown menu under “Sort by” you have the possibility to set the order in which the pages should appear in the portal. Choose between:
• Name
• Date started
• Date created
• Date modified

• Hand-picked selection

With the hand-picked selection you can choose individual courses, programs, pages, and even portals. To do this, click on the respective button and then select by ticking the elements that should appear in the widget.



After selection, you can drag and drop the courses, programs, pages, and portals into the desired order.

• New: RSS feed

The new widget type RSS feed allows you to include content from other websites. Think of including company news from your blog, or have a news portal that displays relevant industry news. To get an idea of how this looks like, just head over to our demo academy and take a look at how we included the Coursepath blog there.

Select the RSS feed by simply adding the URL in the text field and click “Done”.

Define the audience of the widgets

In the tab “Audience” you can set filters to determine which academy members the widget should be shown to. You can adjust this setting for courses, programs, pages, your hand-picked selection, as well as RSS feeds.

• Select one or more groups whose members can see the created widget.
• You can choose which organization the academy members must belong to in order to be able to see the widget. Select one or more organizations here.
• The “Country” filter allows you to set the visibility of the widget for different regions. Select one or more countries. Note that only such countries are displayed that are included in at least one user’s profile.

Conclusion

With the portals in Coursepath, you can design different libraries within one academy. This gives you and your academy members a better overview and the chance to have specifically targeted portals. With self-created widgets, you provide more structure and individual start pages for your academy members. Find out how widgets could be used in this blogpost.