TABLE OF CONTENTS:

About Managers and Locations

This feature allows for the creation of a hierarchy structure for reporting, such as store locations, office locations, districts, divisions, national managers, regional managers, etc. Using Managers and Locations allows you to assign users to a specific location and/or manager.

Manager: the LMS allows teachers of courses special access to the students they teach. In the corporate world, these capabilities are needed by an employee’s manager. With this feature, Managers now have the ability to manage their team independently through generating reports, editing their profiles, tracking their activity, or being notified when they reach key milestones.

Location accommodates the multi-dimensional nature of the corporate structure: an employee has a manager, and a location. For example, Managers may report to a regional manager and the storeowner independently of the another.

The Locations and Managers features function very similarly, therefore, they are treated the same in this article.

Setting up Managers / Locations

The first step you will need to do is change the location settings from the default of notifying Teachers, to notifying Managers. This is done from the Site Administration Menu under Plugins>>> Local Plugins>>> Managers/Locations:

On the page that appears, there are several options to review and enable as needed:

First, if you are using tokens and wish to assign users to managers or locations at the same time that the user applies the token, select yes.

Then set whether managers are notified each time one a new user is assigned to them (New users) or when one of their employees enrols into a course (Enrolment), takes a quiz (Quizes) or receives a certificate (Certificates). Notifications are emailed to the employee’s manager, and any manager in the hierarchy. If the employee is also part of a location, and that location has managers, then that set of managers receives the notification as well.  The default for each of these is no and must be enabled if you want the notification to be sent.

These settings can be overridden based on individual managers, which we will cover shortly.

The next step in setting up your system to use Managers / Locations is to determine the level of intricacy you want your system to operate with. For some sites, only managers are used, and locations are not relevant. For other sites, the reverse is true.

There are three places where Managers / Locations is referenced:

1. The Manager / Location editor from the Browse Locations menu.
2. The Add a new user screen.
3. The User edit profile screen.

If you do not want the Location field or the Manager field to show up within any one of these three screens then you need to remove the check mark next to the following six fields:

The first three fields refer to whether the Location fields are available at the three locations mentioned; the following three fields refer to the Manager fields. When any box is checked (is enabled), the field will be shown and is editable on the page to create or edit a manager or location; when the box is not checked (is disabled), the field is not shown on the creation/edit page.

Adding a New Manager / Location

To add a Manager or Location, go to the Refined Tools block on the Front Page and select Managers/Locations:

The page that appears displays the locations and managers you currently have assigned within your site and allows you to add edit or delete locations or managers:

Clicking on Add a New Location / Manager and enter the ID you will use for the new resource and from the drop down menu chose whether it is a Manager or a Location:

Then indicate whether this specific Manager or Location will receive email notifications regarding the progress of their employees. The default is whatever was set at the system-wide level. Here the notifications can be overridden based on individual Locations or Managers. These fields are set to allow the manager only to turn them off; to turn them on must be done at the system level as described above. To disable the notification, check the box; if left blank, the notification will be sent:

The next step is creating the hierarchy. Here you can select whether that particular Manager or Location has its own Manager or Location. The other Manager or Location must already exist in the system or you must add it first. It will then appear in the drop down menus:

The final step is to enter the details about this location / manager:

 If the Manager is already a “Moodle User” (authenticated user) in your LMS, select their name from the drop down menu or insert their ID number; the related fields will be greyed out because they are referenced from the profile of that user. For Locations, fill in the email and other fields as needed, however the Moodle User field is disabled when location is selected. 

Assigning Locations / Managers

From the user’s Edit profile screen or the Add a new user screen, Managers and Locations can be assigned by selecting them from the drop down menus:

Manager Reports

For information on the reports that Managers can access, see the article Managers and Locations Reporting.