February 2020: Updates to the Approval Mechanism

Platform Updates - The Approval Mechanism

1. APPROVAL ACTIVITY ICON

Activities will have an icon displayed beside their title if they have been set up to require approval (in same way as 'Gateways' and 'Critical Learning Activities' do).

The reason for this change is to improve the user experience. We have received feedback that learners are not aware that an activity requires approval until they submit the activity and its status changes to 'Waiting for approval'. We believe that the addition of this icon will make it clearer to learners and set expectations.

2. IMPROVED APPROVAL MECHANISM

Once the approver has reviewed their learner's activity and selected either to 'Approve' or 'Reject', they are presented with an additional text box to add feedback. If they have rejected the activity, then this feedback is mandatory to explain the reasons for this decision, however it is optional for an approval, which can sometimes results in it being missed and not confirmed.

 We will therefore be improving this process by having the 'Additional feedback' box pop-up on the screen so it's more obvious and cannot be missed. 

3. 'REJECTED' ACTIVITY STATUS

 When a learner completes an activity, its status changes to 'Finished', becomes green in colour and has a tick icon to make it stand out. We have made a similar change for a 'Rejected' activity, as before it was difficult to distinguish them from other activities that were incomplete or not yet been started. 

What will happen now is when an activity is rejected, its status will change to dark orange and have a 'cross' in its icon. A copy of the activity will appear beneath this, for the learner to have another attempt. 

When an activity is completed but requires approval, its status will change to 'Waiting for approval' and have a timer icon.  

Stay Tuned...

A few months back we shared some ideas of ways we could freshen up the look and feel of the platform. This includes oval-shaped action buttons, rounded edges on headings, highlighted toolbar icon indicating the current page, and text sizes. We have been making progress on this and expect it to be ready in the next couple of months. Stay tuned!