Compliance is a feature for recurring courses that users need to retake periodically. Typically, these are courses needed for certain certifications for food and health, financial, insurance, and other types of compliance, but can be any course that you want your users to retake periodically.

This article describes how to set up a compliance course using the validity option Compliance Period, which is based on each learner’s individual completion date, making it ideal for ongoing enrollments with personalized schedules. Read more about the different Compliance Validity Periods.

View video about how to set up a compliance period course and its reminders 🎬👇

When enabling a Compliance Course, the first thing you need to decide and configure is the Compliance and Retake periods.

ℹ️ Changes to your compliance settings can take up to one hour to apply.

The Compliance Period is the number of days the user is compliant for once finishing the course. For instance, if you set the Compliance Period to 365 days and a user finishes the course on May 6th 2022, the user will be compliant until May 6th 2023.

The Retake Period is the period during which the system should notify the user that the compliance period for the course is starting to run out and it's time to retake the course. If you, for instance, set the period to 90 days, Learnster will move the course to the user's Ongoing Courses and start prompting the user that it's time to retake the course 90 days before the course compliance runs out. Per the example above, if the course compliance period runs our May 6th 2023, Learnster will move the course to the user's ongoing courses on February 5th 2023.

ℹ️ Want to allow your Learners retake the course outside of the retake period? Then you can activate Course Reset in your course settings.

With a set compliance period, your Learners have a natural deadline as the compliance period runs out. However, the compliance period only begins once the course has been completed for the first time. To ensure your Learners become compliant from the start, the First Time Completion Deadline feature is available.

To activate, toggle the switch for the first time completion deadline. Once enabled, you can configure the deadline and set up reminders.

When the retake period starts, progress resets to 0% and the course is shown for the Learner as Not Started under My Courses in Learnster U. This will also generate a new enrollment date to the course for the Learner. For each time that a Learner retakes the course a new entry is added to their course history so that you'll be able to see how many times they've been certified.

💡 Be sure to set your preferred completion criteria to your compliance course too. Use "Static" to be able to add new content without it affecting already compliant Learners. Use "Dynamic" if Learners should have to retake the course immediately when new content is added. Or use "Manual Approval" if an Instructor or Course Administrator needs to manually set a Learner is compliant or not.

Message reminders help learners stay on track by notifying them when it’s time to take or retake a compliance course. Since these courses often have deadlines, reminder messages play a key role in making sure learners remain compliant. Here's how you set them up with the compliance period setting:

To activate, toggle the switch for the first time completion deadline. Once enabled, you can configure the deadline and set up reminders. You can add multiple reminders and specify how many days before or after the deadline they should be sent. You can also determine who should receive these reminders. For instance, you might send the first reminder to the Learner and a subsequent one to their Team Manager. To do this, simply add another reminder and select "Team Manager" from the dropdown menu.

The messages sent are regular course reminders (when compliance is enabled, the regular course deadline will be disabled).

In the message group Course reminders:

ℹ️ For more targeted communication, use custom messages. In the course in Academy, you will find videos on how to set them up:

There are three notifications connected to recertifications.

❗️ Be careful with using Actions in Compliance Courses. Actions are triggered depending on a Learner's progress and can also be combined with specific dates. When retaking a compliance course progress is set to 0% and the course can span over a long period of time. Therefore, there's a chance that your actions will be repetitive or out of date.

By default, users that don't redo courses set for recertification will stay on users My Courses and the users will keep being enrolled in the course. By enabling the Remove Learner Once Compliance Expires setting, you can let Learnster automatically remove users that haven't re-certified after X days. When Learnster removes the user, by default the "Course participant removed after compliance period expiration" notification is sent. You can also choose to send a custom message.

With the Compliance Course functionality, you have several ways to track whether learners are compliant. You can follow up directly in the course, in Learnster Teams for managers, or by using Analytics Reports and create reports.

When using the Compliance Course functionality, an extra column will be shown under the Learners tab in your course. This column says "Compliant for" and shows if, and for how long, your Learners are compliant.

Click the report icon to download a report.

Managers can follow up on fixed compliance periods in Learnster Teams:

To follow up compliance status in Analytics Reports, create a participant report, use filters if needed, and then view the column Compliance status.