Learning Groups are a great new addition to the LMS that help admins some features that were previously only available to organizations: slotting in scheduled offerings and use of population directed custom tiles. You might be asking 'so if was already accomplished with organizations, what's the real benefit?". Well, there are some obstacles to using organizations: 1) typically companies will ave to maintain organization data in their user feed, which may take time and effort to modify, and 2) once built and maintained, the organizations may be too broad/cover too large of the population that you are trying to cover.
Here's where groups come in: you can make them with assignment profiles! Assignment profiles can be as "large" or "small" as you need them to be, from covering your entire company to just down to one single person. Almost any attribute on an employees user record can be used to make an assignment profile, so this really unlocks a lot for admins. And there is no longer a need to wait until your userfeed/organization connectors are changed - everything can be done right on the spot.
Let's see this in action. We have a need for admins to reserve scheduled offering spots for supervisors at our headquarters locations. They also want a custom tile for this group.
First thing's first - make your assignment profile. We've selected the headquarters and supervisor user attribute for our profile.
Next, under the related menu on your profile, select Groups. Click the green plus icon to search for and select your group.
Propagate your assignment profile to complete creating your group!
To reserve the slots in your offering, open it and select "add slots" from the "add user" dropdown menu.
Next, choose the Group ID radio button. Add the group ID in the text field, indicate the number of slots, then save.
Now we have slots reserved in this offering just for supervisors in Headquarters.
The custom tile part is even easier! When creating a custom tile in the Landing Page Settings menu (I have another blog about how this is done), just select the group option and add the ID when making the tile.
Hopefully being able to use these features without having to go through organizations makes life a little easier for LMS admins!