BlueVolt Terms: Course Hours vs. Required Seat Time

There is a very important distinction between two commonly used terms in the BlueVolt platform: Course Hours and Seat Time/Required Seat Time. These are two terms often mistaken for one another. However, each serves its own specific purpose.

This article contains the following sections:

• What are Course Hours?
  
• What is Seat Time/Required Seat Time?

What are Course Hours?

Course Hours, sometimes referred to as course length, refers to the length of the course. This could be the exact length of a video or SCORM package, or it might be an estimate of how long the course designer believes a learner will take to get through the course material. You define this field in the Course Editor under 2.Display.

You see the Course Hours on the Learner side when you search for courses in the Course Catalog and when you click on a course.

 

You also see Course Hours on the Transcript view on the Admin side.

 

What is Seat Time/Required Seat Time?

Seat Time or Required Seat Time refers to the length of time a learner must spend on a course or module before that course or module can be marked as Complete. If a learner completes a course or module too quickly and doesn’t spend at least the amount of time set in Seat Time, the course or module will remain In Progress and will not update to Complete. This time is not directly linked to Course Hours and can be set for any amount of time.

Some course designers build a minimum required seat time into SCORM packages or other course files. Those times would not affect the Seat Time set in BlueVolt’s Course Editor, but would still prevent a course from updating to Complete until the requirement is met. As an admin, you wouldn’t be able to see that seat time requirement in BlueVolt when troubleshooting why a course didn’t complete. For that reason, BlueVolt recommends building your courses without seat times and using Seat Time in the Course Editor to set the requirement.

When you are in the Course Editor/3.Modules and you have uploaded your file, a field called Required Seat Time (min) appears. You can add the Required Seat Time in minutes to this field.

NOTE: Currently, Required Seat Time doesn’t display for the Learner or Admin. However, when troubleshooting why a course won’t complete, you can go into the Course Editor and check to see if there is any time placed in that field.