Create Custom Attributes
Create custom attributesThe default User Attributes (including a user’s employee role, manager, location, company, hire date, etc.) cover a range of information about each user, but have you ever wanted to create a Learning Group based on more granular information? If so, D2L can create custom attributes for you!
Custom attributes can be created during implementation of Manager Dashboard and Learning Groups, or you can reach out to your D2L contact to have additional attributes added after implementation. A few ideas for custom attributes include Preferred Language, Speciality, or Leave Status.
Use AND vs OR rules when creating Learning Groups
There is a huge variety of options for adding Automatic Membership Rules when creating a Learning Group! But it can get tricky when adding multiple rules. A few examples might help.
AND Rules: You can create rules in which the members must match two or more attributes. For instance, if Learning Group members should have the Employee Role “Account Manager” and the Location “New York”, you can set up the Learning Group like this:
- Create a Membership Rule with 2 conditions. First, create a rule that states “Employee Role is Account Manager”, then click to “Add Condition”, and add “Location is New York”.
- In this case, if your company has 10 Account Managers, 5 of which are in New York, your group will consist only of the 5 Account Managers in New York.
OR Rules: You can create rules in which the members can match any one of two or more attributes. For instance, if Learning Group members should have the Employee Role “Account Manager” or the Location “New York”, you can set up the Learning Group like this:
- Create 2 Membership Rules. First, create a rule that states “Employee Role is Account Manager”, then click to “Add New Membership Rule”, and add “Location is New York”.
- In this case, if your company has 10 Account Managers, 5 of which are in New York, your group will consist of all 10 Account Managers, plus any additional employees in New York.
OR Attributes: You can create rules in which the members can match one of several options for a single attribute. For instance, if Learning Group members could have the Employee Role “Account Manager” or “Customer Success Manager”, you can set up the Learning Group with a single OR rule as follows:
- Create a Membership rule that states “Employee Role is Account Manager”, then add the additional “Customer Success Manager” to the same rule. This rule will accept users with either the Account Manager or Customer Success Manager title.
- In this case, if your company has 10 Account Managers and 10 Customer Success Managers, your group will consist of all 20 of these members.
Add multiple values for a user attribute
Most of the time, user attributes have just one value per user. A user has only one employee role, only one hire date, only one company name, etc. However, there are cases in which a user might match multiple values for a single attribute. For instance, if a user splits their time between an office in Toronto and one in New York, then you might want to include both of these offices for their “Location” attribute.
In this case, you’ll need to follow the rules for D2L’s Standard CSV, and format the Location attribute as follows:
Editing the CSV in a text editor:
“[“”New York””, “”Toronto””]”
Editing the CSV in Excel:
[“New York”, “Toronto”]
It’s important to use the quotes and brackets as shown, and note that the format is different if you’re saving an Excel workbook as a CSV. Also note that while some attributes allow for multiple values, the Manager attribute can currently be only one user.
Once the user has been set up with these attributes, they will match any Learning Group rules for either location.
View a user’s Company Name
If all of your learners belong to a single company or institution, you likely won’t need to see this information. However, if you are assigning learning to members of an association, for instance, with learners from a range of companies, it can be helpful to have this information easily accessible!
You can look up a user’s company by navigating to the User Attributes page and clicking View Details for an individual user, but there’s another way to quickly see this information. If you are using the Company Name attribute, it will now (as of 20.20.12) appear below the user’s name wherever you are prompted to select users from a list in Manager Dashboard or Learning Groups. For instance, you will see the company name when adding an administrator or when manually adding members to a Learning Group, or when assigning employees to a course in Manager Dashboard. Note, like the Employee Role that also appears below the employee name, this information will be blank if the attribute is not provided for the given user.
View Detailed Data by User Attributes
If you have the Performance Plus package of Brightspace, you’re familiar with Self Serve Analytics. Since the release of the User Attributes data set (20.20.07), you can now combine user attributes with other key information.
For instance, you can combine User Attributes with the Awards Issued data set to see which attributes are most closely correlated to which awards. Alternatively, you could apply it to quiz-related data sets to get a detailed view of how users with certain attributes are responding to specific assessment questions. There are dozens of combination options to help you apply User Attribute information to data throughout Brightspace.
As always, feel free to reach out on Community if you have additional tips!