Discover the Agentforce Education Learning Data Model
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the primary challenges with managing academic data.
- Explain how you can use Agentforce Education to centralize your data.
- Differentiate learning and learner data model objects.
- Explain the purpose and use of the learning object.
Education Cloud is now called Agentforce Education. You might see references to Education Cloud in our application and documentation.
Before You Start
Before you start this badge, consider completing this recommended content.
Academic Data
As you learned in the Academic Operations with Agentforce Education badge, Agentforce Education provides a centralized system for efficiently managing your academic offerings. It also includes intuitive apps, tools, and components for helping students explore programs, plan their degrees, enroll in courses, and visualize their path to graduation.
Through their journey, students are expected to keep track of what they’ve accomplished and what’s still ahead. Academic Operations provides a simple and clear interface for students to keep track of their progress.
Naturally, these capabilities are possible only with correct data. However, at many institutions, academic information, such as course catalogs and completion records, is often scattered across several systems, including learning management systems (LMS) and student information systems (SIS).
This lack of cohesion makes it challenging for both students and staff to keep track of program requirements, prerequisites, electives, and other data needed for effective academic planning. The structure of the curriculum can also vary significantly among institutions and programs, especially with the rise of nontraditional and distance learning. The curriculum often includes microcredentials, certificates, and badges. What’s more, the curriculum can also keep evolving, making it even more difficult to manage, analyze, and scale.
That’s where the Learning Data Model in Agentforce Education comes in. By configuring your academic programs, requirements, achievements, and other records using a consistent strategy, you can simplify academic planning, track student progress, and gain helpful insights into your curriculum. When you have all this data in place, you can also make the most out of powerful Agentforce Education features, such as Intelligent Degree Planning and Learner Progress.
At this point, you might be asking, what exactly is a data model? Basically, it’s a blueprint that defines how your information is organized and stored within Salesforce. To learn the basics of data modeling, check out the Data Modeling badge on Trailhead.
In this badge, you dive into the key components of the Learning Data Model in Agentforce Education. You also learn how to organize your institution data to enhance experiences for students and staff, and guide better decision making.
The Learning Data Model
The Learning Data Model is a flexible framework that you use to unify, structure, and categorize data about programs, courses, requirements, and achievements. By using this model, you can not only organize your educational offerings but also track student progress and record their accomplishments. This learning data serves as a foundation for Academic Operations, Student Success, Recruitment and Admissions, and other Agentforce Education apps.
The model is adaptable and customizable and is built to scale so you can meet the needs of your institution both now and in the future. It supports various types of educational experiences and course structures, including traditional undergraduate and graduate degrees, microcredentials, badges, professional development workshops, and several other types of curriculum.
Because Agentforce Education is built on the Salesforce Platform, you can integrate data from external sources into your Learning Data Model. For example, use Data 360 to map information from your LMS so you can view up-to-date information about your learning programs and courses, including student grades, attendance, and other granular information. Or, integrate your course offerings with class schedules and room assignments from your course scheduling tool. You can also extend the model to include unique, institution-specific data elements.
You don’t have to be a data modeling expert to build your curriculum. Agentforce Education includes intuitive tools for quickly creating programs, courses, and program plans, which you learn about later in this badge. However, learning about each data model object will help you to understand how they all fit together to form a cohesive framework for your academic offerings. Let’s start by breaking down the two categories of objects in the Learning Data Model, learning objects and learner objects.
Learning Data Model Objects
The data model is made up of a series of objects specially designed to support educational processes. While each object has a distinct purpose, you can break down the data model objects into two categories, learning objects and learner objects.
Learning objects serve as templates or definitions for your institution’s offerings. They include components for mapping out your curriculum, such as learning programs, courses, learning program plans, and associated requirements. They also define the accreditations and accomplishments that learners earn by completing a program or course. Through this combination of objects, you define the curriculum your institution offers, without any connections to individual students.
Learner objects, on the other hand, are the components you use to track student enrollment in and progress toward your offerings. These include each learner’s enrolled programs and courses, and records for monitoring their personal progress toward requirements and the results of their coursework. Learner objects are the student-specific instances of your learning offerings.
In this badge, you explore these categories of objects and see how they all fit together to provide a single source of truth for all your academic data.
The Learning Object
Before going further, let’s take a moment to explore one object of particular importance, the learning object. Think of this object as the central hub for your academic data and the foundation for all your Agentforce Education apps. Salesforce automatically creates a learning record whenever you create a Learning Program or Learning Course with the Learning Wizard, which you discover later.
Each learning record defines the curriculum that you can make available as a course or a program. It also stores several fields and relationships that connect to other Learning Data Model objects and metadata related to courses or programs, such as accreditation details and learning achievements. Learning is a parent record of a learning course or program, and each course or program can be associated with only one learning record.
The learning object provides consistency and scalability. It also simplifies the model by reducing the need for complex lookups and separate references to other records, such as learning outcomes, prerequisites, corequisites, recommended learning, and achievement records. For example, along with setting a single course as a prerequisite for another course, you can also define an entire learning program as a preliminary requirement for the course.
You now understand how the Learning Data Model enhances your institution’s ability to manage curriculum and track student progress. In the next unit, you get an in-depth look at the learning objects you use to configure your academic catalog in Agentforce Education.