Explained: Approvals and the approval process

Civica supports the concept of 'approvals', where an 'approver' must approve some action or request for a learner. The following types learner instigated actions might require approval (subject to configuration):

• Session enrolment requests. A learner wishes to attend a training session. Their enrolment request needs to be approved before their enrolment is confirmed.
• Course enrolment requests. A learner wishes to study an online course. Their enrolment request needs to be approved before they are given access to the content.
• Task submissions. A learner completes and submits a task. Their submission needs to be reviewed and approved before it can be considered 'complete'.
• Independent learning activity submissions. A learner registers and submits an independent learning activity. Their submission needs to be validated and approved before it can be added to their learning record.
  

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  Note: Independent Learning Activities (sometimes referred to as External Learning Activities) are deprecated, and are not implemented for new customers. This article remains available for customers who use this legacy feature.

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The system allows administrators to determine who should approve specific items.

The person responsible for handling approval requests tends to vary from organisation to organisation. In some organisations, nominated individuals might be given approval authority perhaps for specific cost centres, business units or departments. In others, managers might be responsible for their team’s approval requests. In others, a central training administrator might be responsible for training related approvals. 

An approver could be anyone within an organisation, but they must have a valid account on Civica Learning. Normally, in anything but the smallest deployment, multiple approvers will be located throughout an organisation, each responsible for performing approvals relating to their cohort, perhaps their team, their department, their cost centre or their business unit for example.

All approvals are handled by 'approvers' in the Civica Web learner portal. No access to the administration portal is needed. When an approver logs into the Web learner portal, if that user has any pending approval requests, these are highlighted with an alert adjacent to the Approvals menu as shown below. 

Clicking the Approvals menu takes the approver to an Approvals page, which lists their current set of pending approvals i.e. those that require action. From here the approver can review the requests and approve or deny each one.

The Approvals page allows the approver to filter the displayed approvals by their state (Pending, Approved, Rejected or All statuses) and by the type of item they refer to (e.g. Task, Session, etc.). Approvers can also see any approvals (or rejections) they have previously performed.

Approvers can delegate other users on the system to process their approvals, by clicking the Delegate approvals button. This can be useful if the approver is going to be unavailable for a period of time. Approvals can be delegated for a set period (by adding From and Until dates/times), or for an indefinite period, if the From and Until dates/times are not specified. Both the original approver and the delegated approver see any new approval notifications, and both can action the approval on a first come first served basis. An example of an approver adding a delegated approval period, is shown below:

For how to manage approval delegation as an administrator, please see the How To: Manage delegation of approvals article.

Task submission approvals

For task submissions, the approver can be identified in a two different ways depending on how the task is configured. The following options are available to the person who creates a task:

• Use a designated approver. With this mode, the task creator can specify who should be responsible for approving the task. For example, if an instructor or lecturer were to set a task, they may want to approve the task submissions themselves, so they could set themselves as the designated approver for the task. Note that any user can be specified as a task’s approver.
• Use the learner’s assigned approver. With this mode, the learner’s assigned approver, as determined by the value of the Approver property in their user profile record, will be used as the approver. In this way, different learners located throughout an organisation could have different approvers for the same task, depending on where they sit within the organisation.

Session and course enrolment approvals

For session or course (strictly any content item) enrolment requests, the approver can be identified in multiple ways, depending on the enrolment configuration for the item in question. The following options are available:

• Use a designated approver. With this mode, the administrator can specify who should handle enrolment requests for the item in question when configuring the enrolment settings. For example, if an instructor or lecturer were to host a session, they would most likely want to approve the enrolment requests themselves, so they could set themselves as the designated approver for enrolment requests.
• Use the learner’s assigned approver. With this mode, the learner’s assigned approver, as determined by the value of the Approver property in their user profile record, will be used as the approver. In this way, different users located throughout an organisation could have different approvers for the same session or course enrolment, depending on where they sit within the organisation.
• Administrator approval. Historically, this was the only option available and is still available for legacy use and where this option remains relevant to your use case. This option requires an administrator to manage enrolments by using the administration interface. With this option, emails will not be sent to the approver when there are outstanding approvals, and approvals will not be displayed in the web learner portal.

Whenever an enrolment or completion approval request is submitted or actioned, except as noted above, email notifications are automatically sent to the appropriate learners and approvers.

In addition to email notifications, tasks and learning activity submissions support a message based dialogue between the learner and the approver. This allows the learner to provide additional information to support their submission, and the approver to communicate the rationale for their approval decision back to the learner. This facility is not available for enrolment requests.

Configuring Approvals

There are two types of approvals within the system:

• Enrolment approvals. Where a learner requests to enrol onto an item and an approver has to accept or deny their request.
• Completion approvals. Where a learner submits an item such as a task or an independent learning activity, and an approver has to accept or reject whether the learner has successfully completed the item.

In all cases, where an approver rather than a Global administrator or Content administrator performs the approval, the approval operation is performed in the Web learner portal.

Enrolment Approvals

Administrators can configure items such that learners must enrol on the items before learners can access them. For example, the administrator might setup an event with a session on a specific day, for which there are 20 places available. Learners will then be required to enrol onto the session, to request their place on the session, and the approver will need to accept or reject their request to attend the session.

The administrator controls available for events and for standard content items, such as courses or tasks, vary slightly. For an event, the following approval types are supported:

• Enrolment required with no approval necessary. Learners enrol onto sessions, but approval is granted automatically with no approver interaction required. The learner receives an email confirming they have enrolled on the session. This enrolment type is the default for new events.
  
  
• Enrolment required with approval by a designated approver for this item. The administrator specifies a user as the approver for the item. When a learner requests to enrol on the item, the items specified approver receives an email asking them to approve or reject the request, and the learner receives an email confirming their approval request is pending. Once the enrolment has been approved or rejected, the learner receives the appropriate confirmation email.
  
  
• Enrolment required with approval by the learner's assigned approver. Where this option is configured, learners must have an Approver property associated with their profile. When a learner requests to enrol on the item, the learners specified approver receives an email asking them to approve or reject the request, and the learner receives an email confirming their approval request is pending. Once the enrolment has been approved or rejected, the learner receives the appropriate confirmation email.

INFO: If the learner does not have an approver configured, a Global administrator will receive the approval request email.

• Enrolment required with admin approval. When a learner requests to enrol on the item, the approval requests are handled in the Administrator portal by any Global administrator or Content administrator with the appropriate permissions. The learner receives an email confirming their approval request is pending. Once the enrolment has been approved or rejected, the learner receives the appropriate confirmation email. In this case, approval requests are handled in the Administration portal by any Global administrator or Content administrator with the appropriate permissions.

For content items, in addition to the above enrolment types, the following approval type is also supported:

• Enrolment not required. Learners are not required to enrol in the item. This enrolment type is the default for all standard content items.

Completion Approvals

Civica enables completion of a learning activity (such as reading a book) or a Task (such as writing and submitting an essay) to be verified by an approver.

Learning activities are approved by the learner's assigned approver. The approver is defined by setting the value of the Approver profile property for each user.

INFO: If a user does not have an approver defined, any submitted learning activity will be automatically approved.

The completion approval for Tasks, can be configured by the administrator to use one of the following approval modes:

• Completion does not need approval. The submitted task is automatically approved as soon as the learner submits the task. No approval workflow is used and no email notifications are sent by the system.
  
  
• Completion requires approval by the learners assigned approver. Where this option is configured, learners must have an Approver property associated with their user profile. When a learner submits the item for approval, the learners specified approver receives an email asking them to approve or reject the submission, and the learner receives an email confirming their approval request is pending. Once the submission has been approved or rejected, the learner receives the appropriate confirmation email.
  
  
• Completion requires approval by a designated approver for this task. The administrator specifies a user as the approver for the task. When a learner submits the item for approval, the tasks specified approver receives an email asking them to approve or reject the submission, and the learner receives an email confirming their approval request is pending. Once the submission has been approved or rejected, the learner receives the appropriate confirmation email.
  

Second Level Approvals

In addition to the approvals process outlined above, the system also allows you to configure events to require a second level of approval. 

In some cases, even though a line manager has approved one of their staff to attend, a learning and development manager might need to review those attending and, for example, ensure places are allocated across the organisation, rather than on a first come, first served basis. To enable this work flow, Civica Learning supports second level approvals for events. 

NOTE: Second level approvals are available for events only. There is no second level approval process for task submissions, independent learning activity submissions or for content item enrolment requests.

With the second level approval feature, an administrator can configure an event to require a second approval by either a Global administrator or a Content administrator. When second level approval is enabled, a learner's enrolment on a session needs to be approved by either the designated approver for the item, or the learner's approver (based on the configuration option selected), AND then an administrator, before they are enrolled.

This feature enables administrators to review the learners that have been provisionally approved to attend a session, and then enrol only those which match their attendance criteria.

For more information about setting up second level approvals, see How To: Configure second level approvals.