Learner Criteria Mapping

In this release, we provide Learners with the ability to suggest assessment criteria mapping when making submissions on activities.

Once a submission is made against an activity, the Learner can update the mapping and suggest changes to it from the default programme mapping. When the trainer marks the submission, they can still update the Learner's mapping as they see fit, to create the final assessment criteria map.

To provide you with flexibility, we have set this up to be enabled on a programme-by-programme basis. Once enabled for a programme all existing and new learners on the programme will have access to this functionality. To assist in rolling this out with your learners we have created an article including a video available here .

This is a Premium feature, so if you are interested in this, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Below is a short video to walk you through the new functionality

For further information on this feature, please refer to the articles below:

• Programme Configuration
• Training Provider Operations
  
  

Preferred Gender & Pronouns

Following your feedback, we have added some further information to support applicants with their preferred gender and pronouns. While we must follow the ESFA ILR specification and continue to collect the applicant’s Legal Sex with only Male and Female options, we have added two optional questions to Bud’s Apprenticeship enrolment:

• Preferred gender
• Preferred pronouns

These questions will be in both the training provider view and the applicant self-enrolment process for Apprenticeship applications. Please note this is not yet available in OST applications.

Where an applicant has selected their preferred pronouns, this will be displayed on their contact card in the Learning Plan, which will be visible to the Learner, Employer and Training Provider. Example:

For further information on selecting preferred genders & pronouns during the Apprenticeship application, please see this article.

It is also possible for existing learners, both Apprenticeship and OST learners, and training provider users to add their preferred pronouns and gender by updating their account page. Like for new applicants, the selected preferred pronouns will be displayed on the contact card for that user.

For further information on selecting preferred genders & pronouns from user account, please see this article.

Cognassist

We have made a few updates to the new Cognassist API, including:

• Client Reference – this will now be populated as the applicant’s Bud ID instead of their email address.
• Programme level – where known, the Apprenticeship programme level will be sent to Cognassist to help enrol the applicant on the correct Cognassist training.
• Error handling – we have extended our error handing when attempting to invite applicants to Cognassist via the Bud enrolment. Where an error occurs, more detailed error messages will be shown on the Cognassist page in Bud.

If you have not yet started using our new Cognassist API, please speak to your Customer Success Manager. We will be disabling the old Cognassist functionality at the end of June.

OST API

You can now set up an API for OST. The new API will accept the basic information to start an application and the option to invite them to self-enrolment. For more information see here.

If you are interested in utilising the API, then please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Bug Fixes

In this release, we have fixed the following bugs:

• Learners not seeing the full activity information when completing a Skill Scan in reviews
• Skill Scans occasionally not displaying during the application
• Employer contacts unable to view & sign the Training Plan document if they were not the original employer contact associated with the application
• Incorrect completions count on the IQA dashboard
• Old trainers still receiving overdue review alerts for learners that have been re-assigned to another trainer

Since the last main release, we had a hotfix to fix the following bug:

• PMRs not exporting correctly to the ILR xml file

Business Intelligence – 12th June @ 15:30

Standard Reports

New Report Application History

We have added a new report to our standard report suite allowing you to view all historic applications and relevant enrolment information associated with them. This can be accessed through the current applications page with a link at the top or within the bottom navigation bar. Some key elements of the report are as follows:

• Replicate the Applicant csv export from the front-end, including OST learners
• View detail on restarted or transferred applications
• See duration of the programme in months for audit/compliance
• View of Archived and Completed applications

Active learning enhancements

We have added the ability to right-click on a learner line and drill through from the Active Learning report to the relevant OTJH Log or Activity submissions. We have also included the Overdue activities field in this dataset for added context.

Missing Signatures for re-generated Documents

We have adjusted our Applications - Missing Signatures report to bring in missing signatures from re-generated documents on the living Training Plan. To see these, you will need to include the “completed” status’ in your applicant status slicer.

The counts at the top of the page still count new application waiting times with the text adjusted to clarify that.

Employer Reports

We have added a few enhancements to our employer reports in this release to encompass some of the features previously added to our standard reports. These include:

• Completion date slicer added to the completions page, allowing users to more accurately select a date range when viewing completions
• The withdrawal notification date slicer has been moved to sit within our standard filters pane
• Active learning status has been added to the learner details page
• Active learning has also been incorporated into the engagement page
• Last submission or message has been separated in the Engagement page to show as two independent fields

ILR Reconciliations

We have added a new report to the ILR Reconciliations suite detailing all learning aim rows in the ILR and enriched with additional BUD data such as trainer, employer and TNP values to offer an overall summary of delivery and mitigating time-consuming merging of data some providers have been struggling with.

Accountability Framework

Following the changes made by the ESFA (document here) taking affect in June 2024, we have adjusted our Accountability Framework report to reflect the updates. A summary of the changes is below:

• Movement of withdrawal rate to supplementary Indicators
• Movement of Ofsted and feedback links to Quality Indicators
• Change to the Thresholds for the below indicators
• Withdrawals
• Apprentices Past Planned End Date
• Breaks in Learning

Full details of the new thresholds can be found here.

Bug Fixes

In this release we have fixed the below bugs:

• “Has Trainer Developmental feedback” field not populating
• Some planned start dates and planned end dates not populating in Reg&Cert tables

Data Warehouse Fields

In this release we have added the following columns to the data warehouse.

Deprecated Table 

This is advanced warning that we are planning to remove the view Presentation.[Learning Outcomes] from the data warehouse in a future release. 

It is computationally expensive to maintain and no longer serves a role in our current model.  Furthermore, we removed the associated fact table Presentation.[Learning Outcomes Links] some time ago.

Learning Outcomes are better served by the following views (named in the singular):  

• [Presentation].[Learning Outcome]  
• [Presentation].[Learning Outcome Links]  

ETL customers

Please check your ETL pipelines to see if this is being used, and if so, make plans to remove it from your ETL.

Kindly also check to see if this is used in your data model down-stream.  Should you find that this is essential to your data model, then please get in touch ASAP and we can look at options.

Report developers

If you have any in-house developed reports, please ask your developers to check for anything that may be referencing this.

Again, if you do have an essential use-case for this table, please let us know as soon as possible.

We don’t have a definitive timeline for removing the table - this is essentially an early opportunity for our customers to make representations regarding its removal and how we can manage this change.  We’re hoping that very few – if any - of our customers are using this table.

Privacy Policy and Acceptable use updated

Changes have been made to Bud's Privacy Policy and Bud's Acceptable Use policy, we have highlighted the updated sections below for your convenience and encourage you to review the policies in full.

• Privacy Policy: Addition of points 3.15 and 3.15.1 which explain Bud's use of Azure OpenAI services.
• Privacy Policy: 4.2 has been updated to include Azure OpenAI.
• Acceptable Use: Section 4.4 has been added for users of Bud Assist.
• Acceptable Use: Addition of point 9.3.19