What this plugin does

LernHive Onboarding teaches trainers their platform step by step. Guided, interactive tours walk a trainer through every skill of their current LernHive level — creating users, enrolling, building courses, adding activities, communicating — directly in the real interface. A dashboard banner invites new trainers in, a tour catalogue tracks progress per topic, and completed levels prepare the trainer for the next one.

Who this is for

The tour catalogue remains capability-based: it needs View onboarding tours in the system context or in at least one course. Teachers and non-editing teachers hold it in their courses, so a course role is enough; the system role LernHive trainer (lernhive_trainer, Site administration → Users → Permissions → Assign system roles) grants it to trainers without a course role. Managers and site administrators hold it by default. Learners do not. The welcome banner and wizard are visible to site administrators and any system roles selected in Welcome audience. Users outside that audience do not see the welcome entry point.

Core concepts

Tour

One interactive, step-by-step walkthrough built on Moodle's user-tour engine — e.g. Create a single user, Manual enrolment, Create a course, Post announcements. Tours never start on their own when you open a page; a tour runs only when you start it. Starting a tour from the catalogue redirects you to the exact target page and plays the tour there; when it ends, you are returned to the onboarding overview automatically. Tour names follow your language; the step texts are German for now.

Category

A themed group of tours with its own progress chip — Level 1 ships Create users, Enrol users, Create courses, Course settings, Create activities, Communication; Level 2 adds Assignments, Advanced forums, BigBlueButton.

Level pack

Tours are organised along the LernHive levels (Explorer → Creator → Pro → Expert → Master). All five packs are shipped and startable: Level 3 (Assessment, Groups), Level 4 (Collaboration, Grades, Reports, Enrolment, Dashboard) and Level 5 (Advanced content, Course lifecycle) were authored in 0.3.58. The Survey activity tour only appears on Moodle versions that still ship that module.

Tour chaining

A tour can require a predecessor. Locked tours render with Unlocks after you complete: … and refuse to start until the prerequisite is done. When you finish a chained tour and return to the overview, a Done. Ready for the next step: … band appears above the grid with a Start now button, so you can move straight into the freshly unlocked successor without hunting for it. The band only appears after a genuine completion — closing a tour early leaves the successor locked and shows no band.

When a tour counts as completed

A tour counts as completed only when you reach its last step. Closing it earlier — with the close button, the Escape key or Skip tour — does not count: it neither adds to your progress nor unlocks the next tour or level. Tours you completed before this rule was introduced stay completed, and replaying a completed tour never takes the completion away.

Sandbox course

A hidden practice course (LernHive Onboarding Sandbox, with Demo assignment: Feedback practice and Demo announcements) that course-context tours started from the catalogue use as a safe target. When you start such a tour from the catalogue, you are enrolled in the practice course as a trainer (once), without a course welcome message unless the setting Send welcome message for the practice course is on. In your own courses, tours are only offered (see below) and never start by themselves.

Tour offer

When you open a page in your own course that a tour explains — for example the form for a new quiz — a notice above the content says There is a guided tour for this page: … with Start tour and Don't show again. A page shows at most one offer: the tour for exactly this page (on activity forms, for the activity type you are adding). It is offered only if the tour belongs to your current level, its predecessor is completed, you have not completed it yet and you have not turned the offer off.

Journeys by role

Trainer: start onboarding from the dashboard

1. Log in and open the dashboard (/my/). While Level 1 is incomplete, the banner Your Trainer Onboarding appears: "Start your step-by-step onboarding — guided tours walk you through every Level 1 skill."
2. Click Start Onboarding (or Continue Onboarding with progress like "3 of 10 tours" once you have begun). A popup version of the invitation can be postponed with Later.
3. Dismissing the banner with its close control hides it permanently; it also auto-hides once Level 1 is complete.

Trainer: work through the tour catalogue

1. Open Your Onboarding (/local/lernhive_onboarding/tours.php): "Step by step through LernHive — interactive tours guide you through all key features."
2. The header shows your level badge (Level 1: Explorer) and Overall progress ("x of y tours").
3. Each category card lists its tours with status — Not started, In progress, Completed — and highlights the recommended next tour under Up next with a Continue button.
4. Click Start tour. You are redirected to the exact target page and the tour plays automatically; afterwards you land back on the onboarding overview.
5. Locked tours show Unlocks after you complete: … — finish the predecessor first.
6. After completing a chained tour, the overview greets you with Done. Ready for the next step: … and a Start now button for the next tour in the chain — one click to keep going.
7. When everything on the level is done: You've completed all tours on this level. Unlock Level X (…) when you are ready. Click Unlock Level X: … — a green band names the new level and its tours are listed right below. Opening the overview alone never changes your level. If your administrators switched automatic level-up off, the line says they will grant the level instead and there is no button.

Trainer: take a tour in your own course

1. Open a page a tour explains, for example add a quiz to one of your courses.
2. Above the form, the notice There is a guided tour for this page: … appears. Nothing starts until you choose.
3. Click Start tour to play the tour right on this page; when it ends you stay where you are. The tour counts as completed when you reach its last step.
4. Or click Don't show again: this tour is no longer offered to you. You can still start it from Your Onboarding at any time.

Trainer: repeat a completed tour

1. Completed tours keep a repeat pill (Repeat: … / Restart) on their category card.
2. Click it to replay the tour from the start — useful as a refresher before doing the task on real content.

Site administrator: set the trainer course category

1. Open Onboarding settings (Site administration → Plugins → Local plugins → Onboarding settings, or the settings cog inside the Onboarding shell — /local/lernhive_onboarding/configuration.php). The page requires site configuration rights.
2. Set Trainer course category — "The course category that the 'Create a course' onboarding tour lands novice trainers in." Point it at the category where your trainers are expected to create courses, especially on multi-tenant installs where Miscellaneous is typically hidden.
3. Save. Selecting a category that no longer exists is rejected with The selected course category is not available.

Site administrator: reopen the welcome wizard

1. Open Onboarding settings (/local/lernhive_onboarding/configuration.php).
2. Under Reopen welcome wizard, select the site administrator who should see the welcome again.
3. Click Reopen wizard for this person. The wizard starts again at its first slide.

Site administrator: edit the welcome banner and audience

1. Open Onboarding settings and use Welcome audience to select system roles; Site administrators is a switch of its own (on by default).
2. Edit the banner heading, introduction and button label.
3. Edit, add or remove slides. Each slide supports an optional function/tour link and an optional help/manual link. Add slide adds an empty row; to remove a slide, clear its title and text before saving.
4. Save. The dashboard banner and wizard use the new content immediately.

Site administrator: choose which feature areas offer tours

1. Open Onboarding settings (/local/lernhive_onboarding/configuration.php).
2. Under Feature areas with tours, clear the box of any area your site does not use — for example Level 2: BigBlueButton when live rooms are switched off in the courses your learners work in.
3. Save. A cleared area disappears from the tour catalogue, stops counting towards level progress (so it can never block a level-up), and its tours are disabled in Moodle, so nobody can start them. Ticking the box again restores them.

Areas are keyed per level, so Level 1: Communication and Level 2: Communication can be switched independently.

Areas that depend on an activity module (currently BigBlueButton) switch off by themselves while that module is disabled under Site administration → Plugins → Activity modules, and come back when it is enabled again. They are not listed in the form while that is the case, because the checkbox could not change anything.

Settings that matter

Who receives onboarding is controlled by role assignment, not by a setting: assign the LernHive Trainer role (created by the plugin) to give a user the dashboard banner.

Limitations

• Level 1 to 5 tour packs are shipped and startable.
• The next level is unlocked with the Unlock Level X button once the current one is fully complete (setting local_lernhive/auto_levelup, on by default). With it off, administrators grant levels from the LernHive admin dashboard.
• The dashboard banner appears only for holders of the LernHive Trainer role and disappears once Level 1 is complete or the banner is dismissed.
• Tours for optional modules (e.g. BigBlueButton) hide automatically when the required plugin or capability is unavailable.
• The plugin stores personal data only as user preferences: the time you completed each tour (last step reached), each tour offer you turned off, the banner-dismissed flag and the welcome wizard state.
• On a course page, a tour offer needs View onboarding tours in that course (a teacher role there is enough); outside a course, the offer follows the catalogue audience. The permission can be overridden per course.
• Deleting the sandbox course breaks course-context tour targets until it is reprovisioned.
• Uninstalling the plugin keeps its tours under Site administration → Appearance → User tours but disables them, so they do not start on their own; the sandbox course stays as well.

Troubleshooting

A trainer does not see the onboarding banner. → Check that the user holds the LernHive Trainer role (capability See the Trainer onboarding dashboard banner). → The banner auto-hides when Level 1 is complete or after the user dismissed it (user preference local_lernhive_onboarding_bannerdismissed).

A tour opens on a wrong or invalid page. → Verify the Trainer course category setting and the placeholder configuration first. → If the sandbox course was deleted, run the plugin upgrade to reprovision it and restore the demo targets.

A tour redirects correctly but does not start. → The tour's path match is out of sync with its start URL — re-import the tour pack by running the plugin upgrade.

A tour is locked although the trainer wants to start it. → By design: This tour is locked until you complete its predecessor. Complete the tour named in the Unlocks after you complete: … hint.

Welcome editor

Out of the box the welcome shows four neutral slides — a welcome, the Dashboard, Onboarding tours and Support — in each viewer's language. The Onboarding and Support slides appear only for people who can open those pages. As long as the texts stay unchanged, saving the settings page stores no copy, so the default keeps following each viewer's language; edited slides are saved as they are. The update to 0.3.78 replaces a welcome that was saved unchanged from the former German default with the neutral one; edited slides and uploaded files stay.

Site administrators open Onboarding settings to edit the welcome banner and its slides directly. Each slide has a title, text, an optional tour/function link and an optional help/manual link. Rows are added with Add slide; a row whose title and text are both empty is removed on save; new rows get their id on save. The displayed order is the saved order.

The Welcome audience section includes site administrators while Site administrators is ticked (the default) and can add system roles. Users in selected roles can view the banner and wizard and save their own progress; they cannot open the configuration page. Administrators outside the audience can still open the wizard from the configuration page.

Customer JSON uploads remain supported. The uploaded file is shown in the file field. Saving the page with a new or changed file imports it: the product slides merged with the file replace the editor content (message The welcome configuration was imported from the uploaded file.). Saving with the same file or without one keeps the editor content.

Screenshots

The following screenshots show the current LernHive demo interface: