Departments

Departments in LatitudeLearning are a way to organize users into groups that can be used as a filter for mass enrollment, as an audience for an announcement, and to provide a common population used for transcript reporting. When an LMS Administrator creates a Department, they will choose one or more position codes to be apart of the Department. It's important to note that they system will only allow a position code to be used in one Department at a time. All users who have a position code contained in the Department will be members of the Department.

Departments can be used for several purposes in LatitudeLearning:

  • Filter for mass enrollment – an LMS Administrator or Instructor can search for a course and use the enroll others menu item to open a user search control. Inside this control, they can select a Department to retrieve a list of students and enroll the entire group with a few clicks.
  • Audience for an announcement – LMS Administrators can use the Announcement menu item to search for a specific audience they want to receive the custom message. When creating the query that creates the audience, they may select any of the Departments that exist in the LMS. Users who belong to the Department will become the audience for the message.
  • Population used for transcript reporting – any user who is able to run the ad hoc report can narrow the scope of students returned by selecting a Department as one of the selection filters. Only users who belong to that Department will be returned by the report.

Since a user is assigned to a Department via position code, when a user is created or when they move from one position to another, they are automatically classified as a member of the given Department. This scenario is especially helpful since the audience of the Department will always be current – as long as a user’s position is accurate.