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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-09-19
Setup Considerations: Learning Lessons

Setup Considerations: Learning Lessons

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of lessons. It explains:
  • Why to set them up.
  • How they fit into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What Are They

Lessons are an item of learning content that users can access as a single unit or as part of a course. Examples:
  • Course guide.
  • Job aid.
  • Movie.
  • Recorded lecture.
  • Software simulation.

Business Benefits

  • Continuously improve your content by creating surveys to gather learner feedback.
  • Encourage social learning by enabling users to personalize content and share expertise by easily uploading videos or other lesson content.
  • Optimize distribution of educational and compliance content throughout your organization.
  • Streamline catalog management by enabling subject matter experts to create and manage their own content.
  • Target areas of your organization with audience-specific content.
  • Facilitate compliance and record-keeping by providing a verifiable record of learner understanding for important content.

Use Cases

  • Build lessons from scratch or using previously loaded media.
  • Create lessons using content from Workday Learning or imported material, or a combination of both.
  • Create media or instructor-led segments.
  • Create single lessons for business tasks or combine multiple lessons to create a course.
  • Define an approval process for new content to maintain a high standard of lesson content.
  • Display featured or recommended content to learners.
  • Host individual lessons in different locations over a specified time period.
  • Include materials related to job-training activities. Example: A forklift driving demonstration and follow-up assessment.
  • Require learners to take lessons for legal compliance training.
  • Require learners to confirm that they have read and understood a policy, safety procedure, or other important content.

Questions to Consider

Question
Consideration
What content do you want to create for lessons?
You can create:
  • External content. Examples: Websites or video links.
  • Media. Examples: Documents or movies.
  • Surveys.
  • Acknowledgments.
Which lesson types do you want to add to blended and digital courses?
You can add these lesson types to blended courses:
  • Acknowledgment
  • External Content
  • In Person Classroom (Instructor Led)
  • Media
  • Survey
  • Training Activity
  • Virtual Classroom (Instructor Led)
You can add these lesson types to digital courses:
  • Acknowledgment
  • External Content
  • Media
  • Survey
How do you want to manage locations for instructor-led lessons?
You can select different locations for each instructor-led lesson. Lesson locations can be anywhere your business has tagged as a training business site.
How do you want to manage expiration dates for lessons?
You can ensure the continuity of lessons by setting an end date on the current lesson that's the same as the start date of the new version.

Recommendations

  • Enforce lesson order to ensure that mandatory lessons are taken in the correct sequence.
  • To ensure that instructors can track attendance and enter grades at lesson level, assign them as both primary and lesson-level instructors.
  • Upload an image to represent the subject matter of instructor-led lessons.

Requirements

You must create topics before you create lessons. Topics enable you to categorize learning content for ease of access.

Limitations

  • Workday can't track external materials. You can't set lessons with external materials as required learning because you can't know their completion status.
  • Workday doesn't support SCORM or AICC packaged content files for stand-alone lessons.
  • Workday doesn't track lessons. To track progress for a single lesson, build a single-lesson course.
  • You can't include Acknowledgment, External Content, Training Activity, or Surveys lesson types in stand-alone lessons.
  • You can't assign a correct answer to a survey response. Workday Learning only uses surveys to gather feedback.
  • You must launch a survey before you can add it as a lesson to a course.
  • You need to access Workday on desktop to mark lessons complete.
  • Content ratings can only be enabled or disabled for all content types in your tenant rather than individual lessons. Comment functionality is independent of content ratings.
  • The enrollment status of every lesson needs to be complete to rate a course or a program, including SCORM.

Tenant Setup

Access the
Edit Tenant Setup - HCM
task to configure these tenant-wide options for lessons:
Option
Description
Enable Packaged Content
Enables you to upload packaged media content as lessons in a course.
Enable Packaged Content on Mobile
Enables users to view packaged content for learning lessons on:
  • Android.
  • iOS.
Enable Rating on Courses and Lessons
Enables users to rate lessons that they're enrolled in and stand-alone lessons in the learning catalog.

Security

Domain
Considerations
Learning Access
domain in the Learning Core functional area.
Enables users to:
  • Complete lessons.
  • Set learning preferences.
  • View lesson information.
  • View lesson progress.
Create and Manage Surveys
in the System functional area.
Enables users to create, edit, copy, view, launch, close, and cancel survey lessons.
Manage Surveys
in the System functional area.
Enables users to create, edit, copy, view, launch, close, and cancel survey lessons.
Self-Service: Take Surveys
in the System functional area.
Enables users to access Workday survey lessons.

Business Processes

Business Process
Description
Manage External Learning Assessor
Manage Internal Learning Assessor
Enables you to create and edit internal and external learning assessors.
Manage External Learning Instructor
Manage Internal Learning Instructor
Enables you to set up and manage internal instructors from workers already in your tenant and external, third-party instructors.
Manage Lesson
Enables you to create and edit of all types of lessons, including creating new versions of an existing lesson. You can add approval steps to ensure that lessons meet requirements before publication.

Reporting

Report or Dashboard
Description
Courses and Lessons Created (Last 12 Months)
Monitor the rate at which users create learning content. Example: Use this information to plan for which departments require more lessons.
Learning Content by Rating
Monitor the quality of your learning catalog through ratings-based groupings of lessons.
Learning Trainer
Enable trainers to:
  • Manage grading and attendance.
  • Manage training activity lessons.
  • Manage waitlists.
  • View schedules for lessons that they're teaching.

Integrations

Web Service
Consideration
Manage External Learning Instructor
Manage Internal Learning Instructor
Enables you to designate external third-party users as external instructors and workers as internal instructors.
Manage Lesson
Enables you to create or update stand-alone lessons.
Manage External Learning Assessor
Manage Internal Learning Assessor
Enables you to create or update internal or external learning assessors.

Connections and Touchpoints

Touchpoint
Consideration
Onboarding
You can create required learning campaigns to display lessons on the
Required for You
worklet on the Onboarding dashboard.
Talent
You can use survey functionality from Talent as a lesson type within a course to get feedback so that you can improve your content.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.