Taking LINCS Learning Portal Courses

Once logged into the LINCS Learning Portal, you can find the list of courses you’re signed up for by clicking the My Courses menu on the left-hand side of the screen.

Completing Your Course

Before you can achieve a certificate of completion, your course must be marked as complete. To accomplish this, you must make sure that all the sections within a course have checkmarks on the right hand side to show that they are complete.

If you're not sure if you've completed a section, make sure to click the Next button until you've reached the end of the section or moved automatically to the following section. You may see small blue navigational arrows at the top and bottom of each page of the course, and in order for the sections to be marked as complete, you must click on the up arrow at the end of each section as in the screenshot below.

A checkmark will appear once the section is complete. Your progress will be stored in the course, and once a checkmark has appeared, it will remain there when next you visit. Once all required sections show a checkmark, your certificate of completion will become available.

Downloading a Certificate of Completion

To access and print your certificate once a course is complete, select "My Courses" from the navigation column on the left-hand side of the screen, click on the title of your course, then look for the link to the "Certificate of Completion" in the center or at the bottom of the page.

Course completion

Many LINCS online courses have the following format: A list with multiple sections and a checkbox for each one:

There are two types of checkboxes: Dashed-line checkboxes, which automatically show completion once you’ve viewed all the contents within the section, and solid-line checkboxes, which you must click to show that you consider the section complete, denote mandatory course sections, and solid-line checkboxes, which denote optional sections.

If you are having trouble obtaining your certificate of completion for a course, please make sure that all checkboxes are filled in, even if you did not complete the optional portion. You may need to manually click to fill any solid-line checkboxes.

Taking a course more than once

You may return to a course you’ve already completed in order to go back over resources and materials. However, you cannot earn a second certificate or update the date on a certificate for a course you’ve already completed. If you re-take a course, you will not obtain a new certificate.

SCORM

SCORM stands for "Sharable Content Object Reference Model," and is the name of a compressed file used for creating educational courses online. Some of the LINCS courses include SCORM.

Most SCORM courses open up in a new window and have a table of contents on the left hand side.

You can check which parts of a course you have completed and which ones are left to be completed by selecting the "Menu" once the course window is open.

As shown in the image above, a checkmark will appear next to completed sessions. You may also go directly to the incomplete session from here rather than screening through each page.

Enrollment and Facilitated Courses

Some courses allow for self-enrollment, while for others, you must be enrolled by an instructor or course manager.

View our list of self-enrollment courses. You can start taking any of these at any time.

Facilitated courses typically have sign-up sheets outside of the Learning Portal itself (sometimes these are announced in the LINCS Community http://community.lincs.ed.gov). Once you’ve signed up, a course facilitator will enroll you. You’ll receive instructions specific to the course from the course facilitator(s). There may also be graded or otherwise reviewed assignments during the progress of the course itself; you’ll communicate with the course facilitator about these directly.

The LINCS Professional Development (PD) Center partners with states to offer facilitated online courses from the LINCS Training Catalog. States can request, use, and customize LINCS trainings and resources to develop the next generation of state and local topical experts.