Activate LMS is built around five core concepts that fit together in a simple way. Once you understand how they relate, the rest of the system — from automatic enrollments to workflows and reports — makes much more sense.
This article gives you the "big picture" of how everything fits together. For step-by-step guides on the individual concepts, follow the links to the dedicated articles at the bottom of each section.
The big picture
At the highest level, Activate LMS answers three questions:
- Who are the users? (Organisation + Learning Profile + Role)
- What should they learn? (Learning Activities)
- How are they assigned and reminded? (Automatic Enrollment + Workflows)
The diagram below shows the full model on one page.
1. Structure — who your learners are
Every user in Activate LMS is described by three things:
- An Organisation — where they sit in your company. Organisations form a tree (typically mirroring your org chart), and every user belongs to exactly one. Sub-organisations inherit settings from their parent unless you override them.
- One or more Learning Profiles — typically their job function (Nurse, Sales Representative, Firefighter, Auditor, etc.). Profiles decide what content is relevant for the user and can also form a hierarchy (Detective is a child of Police Officer, so reports on Police Officers include Detectives).
- One or more Roles — what the user is allowed to do in the system. All users have the User role. Managers, Site Admins and Authors get additional permissions.
The organisation tree
The manager of an organisation can see reports for the users in it (including sub-orgs), and receives notifications about overdue assignments, completions, and other events you configure.
Read more about organisations → · Read more about learning profiles → · Read more about users →
2. Content — what they learn
Everything a user can be assigned to is a Learning Activity. There are three default types:
- Document — a .pdf, .doc or .html file. Tracks only "opened / not opened".
- Elearning Module — a single SCORM package. Full SCORM tracking (completion, quiz answers, time spent).
- Course — a group of modules and/or documents. Children can be linked (must pass A before starting B) or connectionless (any order).
Activate LMS supports up to 7 nested levels — typically Class → Subject → Course → Module — and level names can be renamed and localised to fit your terminology.
When a user is assigned to a Learning Activity, an Enrollment is created. The enrollment is what actually tracks the user's progress through the content via SCORM: start time, completion status, quiz answers, time spent, pass/fail.
Read more about learning activities →
3. Automation — how they get assigned and reminded
You could assign every user to every course by hand — but you almost never should. Activate LMS has two automation systems that do the heavy lifting: Automatic Enrollment and Workflows.
Automatic Enrollment: assign by rule
An Automatic Enrollment rule says "anyone in this Organisation with this Learning Profile should be enrolled in this Activity." The rule is defined on the organisation and matches users on their Learning Profile.
You can define lag times (start date, due date, expiration date) relative to when the rule fires, and control whether the enrollment is active immediately or held back for later activation.
Two things to remember:
- Changes to a rule only affect future enrollments — unless you tick Update existing enrollments.
- Deleting a rule does not delete the enrollments it already created. The rule just stops firing for new matches.
Read how to set up an automatic enrollment →
Workflows: react to events
Where Automatic Enrollment says "who should be enrolled", Workflows say "and what should happen at each step along the way." Every workflow rule has four parts:
Common uses:
- Send a reminder 3 days before a course is due.
- Enroll a user in the next module when they pass the previous one.
- Move a user to a new Learning Profile when they complete their certification.
- Send the manager an alert if an enrollment expires without completion.
Workflow rules are grouped in Workflow Profiles, so different organisations can use different variants of the same rules (for example, "auto-enroll on day 0" for HQ, "auto-enroll on day 14" for franchise partners).
Reporting closes the loop
Once users are enrolled and working through activities, the Reports section lets you see what's happening: who has completed what, how they answered specific questions, how much time they spent, and how far a whole organisation has come with its assignments. Managers can even receive reports by email on a schedule.
Putting it together: a typical setup
A common way to roll out Activate LMS looks like this:
- Model your organisation tree to mirror your org chart, and assign a manager to each unit.
- Create Learning Profiles for each job function that has distinct training needs.
- Upload your Learning Activities (SCORM packages, documents, courses).
- Create Automatic Enrollment rules on the relevant organisations to auto-assign the right content to the right profiles.
- Add Workflow rules for reminders, chained activities, and manager notifications.
- Create your users — manually, via CSV upload, via API, via SSO auto-provisioning, or by letting them self-register with a challenge code. As soon as they exist and match a rule, they're enrolled and the automation takes over.
From that point on, the day-to-day work is mostly on the reports side — the enrollment and reminder logic keeps running by itself.
Where to go next
- Getting started with Activate LMS — the tour of the admin interface
- Basic feature overview — what each role can do
- Organisations
- Users
- Learning Profiles
- Learning Activities
- Workflows
- Reports
- Single Sign-On with Azure AD (OIDC) — the recommended way to connect Activate LMS to your identity provider