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April sees the first of our 2024 major releases for Academy, bringing with it a range of new features that will give Academy users increased control over their payments and enrolments, enable more in-depth feedback and open up new possibilities for your learning. In this post, we’ll take a look at Academy’s new features and the benefits they can bring to your learning.
New Purchasing Journeys in the Academy catalogue:
When it comes to workplace and executive education, a majority of courses are not purchased by the participant, but by a sponsor on their behalf, with Guroo Learning’s recent market research showing that only 11% of learners surveyed had paid for their learning themselves.
This means that 89% of the time the buyer and the learner are not the same individual. Recognising this and in order to better support this purchase behaviour, Academy now supports multiple purchasing journeys including:
- Buy for myself
- Buy for someone else
- Buy for a small team (including multi-seat discounts)
With these options, you can now more easily position and market your learning to the people most likely to make the purchasing decision, helping you to increase your overall enrolments.
Apply Only Programs
Not every program is suited to open enrollment. In some cases, you may want to restrict enrolment in a course to someone who meets specific criteria or have exclusive invitation-only offerings, and for these cases, we have now introduced ‘Apply Only’ programs.
Apply Only programs can be set up so that a person who is interested needs to apply to attend or join the course. In addition, to help you manage the application process from potential candidates, we have created a new Applications Inbox to make it easier for your team or administrators to review and manage applications.
Coupon Codes & Multi-Seat Discounts
Previously, stripe coupons operated at a platform level, across all Academy programs. This resulted in it not being possible to make a coupon code eligible for some programs and not others. In this release, coupon codes have moved from Stripe and directly into Academy to provide more flexibility in how and where they can be applied.
Academy coupons now enable at a more granular level, facilitating targeted discounting to an individual or series of programs at a time, with the added bonus of enabling us to add more flexibility in the future as we mature this feature.
To further complement the “Buy for my team” functionality we have been able to introduce multi-seat discounts that can be applied to larger purchases. This feature allows for volume-based discounting that does not rely on a coupon code.
Coupons and Discounts can be managed via Program Admin in Academy.
Invoicing
Issuing and reconciling invoices is a frequent challenge for any organisation and one our partners have always sought assistance with. Stripe invoices are easy to generate, but offer limited payment options and can often be difficult to reconcile.
We have now integrated all payment and transaction information within Academy’s open APIs, creating the ability to integrate your invoicing system with Academy for an easier, streamlined invoicing process.
Additionally, for users not able to integrate their systems, Academy now allows purchasers to “request an invoice”, automatically generating an invoice request that will be sent to the new Invoice Inbox, where they can be processed by a member of your finance team. The finance team can then:
- Create the invoice and upload it to Academy, and use Academy to email the invoice to the participant
- Create and send the invoice via your existing processes and mark the invoice request as “Awaiting Payment”
- Mark the invoice as “Paid” in Academy, granting the participant access to the program.
Evaluations & Learning Impact Reports
This release introduces the next iteration in our Program Wrap-Up Feature - Evaluations and Learning Impact Reports, adding new functionality that will help you to measure and evaluate the impact of your learning and your learners’ overall experience.
In this release, we have added the option to:
- Include a learner satisfaction or NPS (Net Promoter Score) question
- Ask learners to rate the alignment of the program learning objectives to what the program actually delivered.
These new options can be enabled in the Offboarding sections of the settings, and the reporting on this data is available in the platform-wide reports.
Other New/Enhanced Features
Optimised Program Admin Search
Yep, we know - the Program Search in Program Admin was slow and frequently annoying. This release has significantly boosted Program Search’s speed, and if you need to see the progress count, you can still access it by clicking on the seat count.
Favicons
If you’re not sure what a favicon is, it’s that little icon that appears in the browser tab for the website/application you’re using. Add a favicon for your site via Portal Settings > Themes. You’ll find it in the same section as your Academy logo.
New Audio/Podcast Activity
We’ve added a new activity type, specific to audio. Add audio files (like podcasts) and play them via the interface, opening up new possibilities that can allow you to create more realistic and lifelike learning scenarios, add deeper engagement, or support learning activities with podcast-style content.
Academy’s new features are live now! If you have further questions about how to access your new features, you can access Academy’s help documents here, or drop us a line here.