Introduction to Section Availability & Adaptive Sections

Manage availability of sections in your program.

Updated at June 13th, 2025

All sections in Academy have Availability Rules that determine when a participant can access the activities, tasks and content in that section.

This screenshot shows the learner view of a course. The user has navigated to a page in the learning journey where they can access some overview information and a resource activity. The second section of the page is hidden, showing a lock icon and displays a message reading: this section is not yet available.

 

By default, all new sections are locked to participants. The Availability rules are set in the Section settings. There are four different availability rules:

Available

The activities and tasks in the section are visible/available to participants.

Locked (default)

The activities and tasks in the section are NOT visible/available to participants.

If Previous Section is Complete

The activities and tasks in the section are visible/available to participants AFTER they have completed the previous section’s activities/tasks.

Specific Time

The activities and tasks in the section will be made visible/available to participants AFTER a specific date/time.

 

Adaptive Sections

 
In addition to the section availability rules above, sections can also be made available to different types of users or not based on:
 
  • a property of the user - for example, a section might be made available to all users with “Manager” as their job title, but not available to all other users
  • a property of the user's location/organisation/entity - for example, a section might be made available to all users who work in the Human Resources Department
  • a Diagnostic outcome - for example, if a user completes a Diagnostic at the beginning of a program, and achieves a poor outcome for a specific indicator (for example, a low confidence outcome for a Conflict Resolution indicator), then adaptive sections can be made available to users who achieved this outcome in order to provide them with additional learning to support them in this area.
  • the user's membership of a specific group in the program - for example, sections can be displayed or hidden to different program groups

To make a section adaptive:

  1. Edit the section properties
  2. Choose Available to "Specific Learners”
  3. Add a filter
  4. Choose the property type and property you want to use to show/hide the section
  5. Then click Done

Once saved, this section will only display to the learners who belong to the filter group you have created.

 

How do Adaptive Sections affect program completion?

By making a section adaptive, you are showing it to some learners and hiding it from the rest.

Learners who do not have access to the section are therefore never given the opportunity to complete the content and activities contained in that section. This means that in order to complete the program/course:

  • learners who can see the adaptive section must complete any required content and activities in that section in order to complete the program/course
  • learners WHO CANNOT SEE THE ADAPTIVE SECTION are not required to complete any of the content or activities in the the section in order to complete the program/course.

 

Example Use Cases for Adaptive Sections

  • Running the same program for Team Members and their Managers, but using Adaptive Sections to show some additional information and activities to Managers only.
  • Running a program with “teams”. For example a Negotiation program, where “Team A” is given information about the motives and goals of one side of a Negotiation activity and “Team B” is given information about the motives and goals of the other side of the a Negotiation activity, and both teams have to negotiate an outcome without knowing the information provided to the other team.
  • Running a program that has different rules/laws/policies/regulations for different locations/jurisdictions, and only providing the information on these rules that is relevant to each individual learner, based on their location/jurisdiction.