Tutorial - How to Send Calendar Invitations

Blanchard Exchange can send calendar invitations for all live events associated with your projects, enabling learners to easily add these events to their personal email calendars.

This option can even be applied to organizations using email clients that do not support calendaring. When enabled, learners can pick their response (Accept/Tentative/Decline) directly from the Learner Portal under each live event in their course.

To enable this option, open your project and follow the steps below:

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1. Go to the "Settings" tab within the project (Figure 1-1).
   
   
2. Enable the calendar invitation option (Figure 1-2).
   
   
3. You'll get a pop-up message asking you to confirm you want to enable the option. Select "Yes" (Figure 2)
   
   
   

Calendar invitations will then be distributed for all live events in your projects, such as Face-to-Face sessions, Virtual Sessions and Teleconferences. These calendar invitations will include the session title, description, start times/end times, and descriptive locations/map link (if entered during the project setup).

Tracking & Resending Calendar Invitations

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Once calendar invitations have been enabled, the responses of those calendar invitations from the individual learners, such as "Accepted", "Declined", and "Tentative" will be recorded under the Events tab of the project (Figure 3-1). Totals for each category of acceptance are displayed, with the ability to select a total to then see the list of applicable learners.

These same responses will also be recorded for each individual learner directly on the Learner Portal, with each live event indicating the individual learner's response.

Calendar invitation responses will be listed by each live event. As an example, The SLII Experience^TM 2-Day Face-to-Face course will list two individual live events, with one for the LEARN session, and another for the PRACTICE session.

Note that administrators have the ability to change these recorded responses, so if a learner declines, and asks that their response be changed to accepted by the administrator, this is possible with the Events tab functionality . However, note that this only changes the response recorded in the Corporate Portal (i.e. changing a learner's response from "Tentative" to "Accepted" does not change the status on the learner's personal calendar).

To resend a calendar invitation, navigate to the appropriate session listed on the page, select the "All" total, and then find the learner's name on the list who needs their calendar invitation resent. Select the checkbox next to the appropriate learner, followed by selecting the Resend Invitations option.

To resend calendar invitations for a specific session to all learners in a project, select the checkbox on the top of the list to select all learners under the event, followed by selecting the Resend Invitations option.

Canceling Calendar Invitations

If you need to cancel the calendar invitations after they have been sent, complete the following in your project:

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1. Go to the Settings tab within the project (Figure 4-1).
   
   
2. Disable the calendar invitations option (Figure 4-2).
   
   
3. A pop-up message will be displayed asking you to confirm you want to cancel the invitations. Select "Yes" (Figure 5).
   
   

Learner Portal Calendar Invitation Features

Email clients are not the only place where learners can manage their calendar invitation responses. The Learner Portal also provides learners an option to choose their responses and includes the ability to resend calendar invitations if the original calendar invitation is lost or deleted.

The following table shows examples of how the calendar invitation feature can be utilized directly from the Learner Portal:

When calendar invitations are enabled and no response has been recorded from a learner's calendar, live events displayed on courses will include response options below each event (Figure 6).

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