Learning

Learning is where your company's courses live. Employees take them, managers follow their team through them, authors build them and HR reports on them. Learning is included on every plan.

What Learning is

A course has modules, and a module has lessons. A lesson is text, an image, a video link or a quiz. People finish a course by working through the lessons and passing the quizzes. A passed course can earn a certificate.

What you see depends on your role:

Everyone sees My Learning.
Managers also see Team learning.
Course authors also see Courses, where they build and publish courses.
HR also sees Learning under Analytics for reports, and Learning under People settings for certificate and reminder settings.

Taking a course

My Learning

Open Learning in the sidebar. The strip under the header has four views: To do, In progress, Done and Browse. The page opens on In progress when you have a course under way, otherwise on To do, then Done. Browse lists courses that are open to everyone, with an Enrol button. The icon switch in the header changes the list to cards and back.

My Learning 3 courses · 2 to finish To do 1 In progress 1 Done 1 Browse Fire safety at Acme 2 modules · 4 lessons Due 20 Oct To do Start

Each row shows the course, how many modules and lessons it has, the due date, your progress and a status. A course past its due date reads Overdue since with the date. Select Start or Continue to open the course. On a finished course, select the row to open its summary and Download certificate.

The course player

The player shows one lesson at a time in a reading column. Show lessons opens the list of lessons beside it and Hide lessons closes it again; Sparko remembers your choice. Previous and Next move between lessons, and the last lesson says Finish. The cross at the top leaves the course, and your place is saved.

Quizzes

A quiz shows its question count and the pass mark. Pick your answers and select Submit. After you submit, each question shows the right answer and, where the author wrote one, the reason. If you do not reach the pass mark, select Try again. You get three attempts a day on each quiz; after the third, the player tells you when you can try again. Your best score counts.

Certificates

When you finish a course that issues certificates, a banner appears with Download certificate. A certificate shows its serial number, when it was issued and when it expires, or that it does not expire. When a certificate expires, you are enrolled in the course again. Your certificates also appear under Certifications in Career, with View certificate.

For managers

Team learning

Team learning groups your people by course. Each row shows the course, how many people are enrolled, how many completed it, how many are overdue and the average score. The strip filters to All, Overdue, Due soon or Done.

Team learning Assign course

Course	Enrolled	Completed	Overdue	Avg score
Fire safety at Acme	12	9	2	86

Select a course to open the list of people on it, with each person's status.

Reminders

In the people list, Remind sends one person an email and a notification. Remind all overdue sends to everyone overdue on that course. A person gets at most one reminder a day from you, and Sparko tells you when someone was already reminded today.

Sparko also reminds people on its own. Inside the reminder window set in Learning settings, a person gets one "Course due soon" notice and email per assignment, even if the due date moves. From the day after the due date they get a "Course overdue" notice, once a week while it stays overdue, and their manager is told too.

Assign course

Assign course enrols people in a published course. You can pick only people in your own team. HR and others with company-wide rights can pick anyone.

Learning with Sparko AI

Learning with Sparko AI builds learning for one person. Find it as a sparkle button on a person's row in a course's people list, as the Assign learning button on each member card in Career › Team Development, and, for HR, as the Assign learning sparkle button on the person's profile next to More actions. You can also ask Sparko AI in the assistant, for example "Create a learning opportunity for Zachary to improve customer calls". You can only build learning for people you can assign courses to.

The drawer has two steps.

Course. Type what the person should learn and select Find or draft. Sparko looks through your published courses and tells you one of three things:
- Existing course fits. Sparko enrols the person and copies nothing.
- Modified copy. A copy of a close course, with lessons marked Rewrite, New or Removed. The original stays as it is.
- New course. An outline Sparko will write.
Rename the course, add or remove modules and lessons, choose which modules end with a quiz, and use Restore to bring back a removed lesson. Advanced holds the length (Short, Standard or Long), the audience, the linked skills and visuals. Add your own images in the course builder after Create. Generated images are marked Coming soon. Select Ask again to get a new suggestion.
Enrolment. Check the due date, which starts as the company default from Learning settings. Pick what the course counts toward: one of the person's career goals or skills. For a copy or a new course, choose Save as a draft or Publish it. Publishing needs permission to publish courses. The box above Create shows how many AI actions creating it will use.

Nothing is created until you select Create. A copy or a new course is saved as a draft you own while Sparko writes the lessons.

An existing course enrols the person straight away.
A draft enrols the person when the course is published.
Publish it publishes the course once Sparko has written it and enrols the person then.
If Sparko could not finish a step, or wrote text that needs a check, it keeps the course as a draft and tells you in a notice that opens the course, even when you chose Publish it. Check the course, then publish it yourself and the person is enrolled then.

You can ask Sparko AI to suggest up to ten courses an hour. After that, try again later.

If the assistant cannot tell who you mean, it lists the people with that name and asks for the full name.

Building a course

Open Courses to see every course, with its status (Draft, Published or Archived), enrolled and completed counts, due rule and last update. Select New course and pick how to start:

Blank creates an empty draft. You write the lessons yourself.
Draft with AI writes a course from a title and audience.
Import turns a course you wrote elsewhere into a draft.

Draft with AI

Give a title and who the course is for, choose Short, Standard or Long, and select Draft outline. Sparko proposes the modules and lessons. Nothing is written until you confirm: rename, remove or add anything, then select Confirm and draft. Sparko then writes the lessons and one quiz per module in the background. You can leave the page; a progress bar shows the job and Stop ends it. Archiving the course also stops it. Lessons already drafted are kept, and if a draft ends early the builder says why.

The course builder

The builder lists the modules as an accordion. Open a lesson to edit it in place and select Save lesson. Use Add module and Add lesson, Rename and Delete module to change the shape.

A lesson can be:

Text, with headings, bold, italic, lists, quotes and links.
Image, a PNG, JPEG or GIF up to 5 MB, with alt text and a caption.
Video, a link from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom, with notes under the video.
Quiz, described below.

On a text lesson, Regenerate has the AI write it again and Shorten makes it shorter. Both rewrite the lesson text and save it straight away, so read the result afterwards.

Quizzes

A question is Single answer, Multiple answers or True or false. Add options, mark the correct ones and write a reason that is shown with the right answer after submit. A course cannot be published if a question has no correct answer, has two identical options, or marks every option correct in a multiple answer question.

Settings

Settings in the builder opens a drawer with the title, description and estimated length, the audience, the Pass mark, Certificate on completion with Valid for (or never expires), Open enrolment so anyone can join from Browse, and Linked skills. When someone completes the course, Sparko suggests the linked skills for their profile.

Publish

Publish checks the course first. Every module needs at least one lesson, every lesson needs content and every quiz must be valid. Anything that fails is listed under Fix these before you publish. On success, people matching the course's rules are enrolled. An archived course cannot be edited. Duplicate it from Courses to make changes.

Enrolment rules

The Rules tab on a course says who is enrolled. Select Add rule and choose who it covers: Everyone, a Role, a Team, a Department, an Entity or a Person. Set the due date as a number of days after assignment or a fixed date, or leave it with no due date. A rule that covers more than one person enrolls employees only; tick Include contractors to enrol contractors and freelancers too. A rule on one person always applies.

Matching people are enrolled when the course is published, and new joiners are enrolled overnight. When you remove a rule, people it enrolled who had not started are withdrawn. Anyone who had started keeps their progress.

Import a course from Claude, ChatGPT or any editor

You can write a course in any tool and bring it in. In New course, choose Import, then paste the text or drop a file. PDF, Word, Markdown and plain text files are accepted, up to 10 MB.

The Sparko course format

If the text follows the Sparko course format, it imports without AI and costs no AI actions. Before the course is created, Sparko shows how many modules, lessons and questions it found and lists any lines that could not be placed. Those lines are left out.

# Fire safety at Acme
Audience: Everyone in the Singapore office
Pass mark: 80

## Before a fire
### Know your exits
Every floor has two marked exits. Learn both on your first day.
![Floor plan](https://example.com/plan.png)
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

### Quiz: Module check
1. How many marked exits does every floor have?
- [ ] One
- [x] Two
- [ ] Three
Why: Every floor has two marked exits so one blocked exit never traps anyone.
2. The lift is a safe way out during a fire.
- [ ] True
- [x] False

Start with one line '# Course title'. Optional 'Audience:' and 'Pass mark:' lines follow it. Each '## ' line starts a module and each '### ' line starts a lesson. A lesson whose title starts with 'Quiz' is a quiz: number each question, list its options as '- [ ]' and tick correct ones '- [x]'. Two or more ticks make a multi-answer question. 'Why:' gives the reason shown after the answer. A line 'Video: ' with a YouTube, Vimeo or Loom link makes a video lesson. Images are not fetched; their description is kept.

Images are not downloaded; their description is kept. A video link from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom becomes a video lesson. Any other link stays as text.

Copy the prompt

Select Copy the prompt in the Import view and paste it into Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant. The prompt asks for exactly the format above. Sparko fills in your title and audience where {title} and {audience} appear below.

Write a complete training course titled {title} for {audience}. Use exactly this format, with no text before the first line and nothing after the last quiz:

# Fire safety at Acme
Audience: Everyone in the Singapore office
Pass mark: 80

## Before a fire
### Know your exits
Every floor has two marked exits. Learn both on your first day.
![Floor plan](https://example.com/plan.png)
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

### Quiz: Module check
1. How many marked exits does every floor have?
- [ ] One
- [x] Two
- [ ] Three
Why: Every floor has two marked exits so one blocked exit never traps anyone.
2. The lift is a safe way out during a fire.
- [ ] True
- [x] False

Start with one line '# Course title'. Optional 'Audience:' and 'Pass mark:' lines follow it. Each '## ' line starts a module and each '### ' line starts a lesson. A lesson whose title starts with 'Quiz' is a quiz: number each question, list its options as '- [ ]' and tick correct ones '- [x]'. Two or more ticks make a multi-answer question. 'Why:' gives the reason shown after the answer. A line 'Video: <link>' with a YouTube, Vimeo or Loom link makes a video lesson. Images are not fetched; their description is kept.

Text in another shape

If the text is not in the Sparko format, you can have AI organise it. Sparko keeps your wording, splits it into lessons and adds one quiz per module. Very long documents are refused with a prompt to split them and import each part. If part of the document reads like instructions to the AI rather than course content, the builder names that part so you can review it.

AI actions

Some steps use AI actions from your monthly AI allowance:

Draft with AI costs about 7, 13 or 26 actions for a Short, Standard or Long course.
Structure with AI costs two actions for each part of the document.
Regenerate and Shorten cost one action each.

The screen shows the estimate before you confirm. On the Core plan these come from the monthly allowance, and when it runs out a draft stops and keeps what was already written. On Growth and above, AI authoring is fair use. The Sparko format import, building by hand and everything employees do in the player use no AI actions.

Learning with Sparko AI uses one action to suggest a course, and one more when it outlines a new course. Creating a copy or a new course then uses one action for each lesson it rewrites or writes and one for each new quiz, the number the drawer shows above Create. From the assistant, creating also counts as one assistant action. Reviewing the suggestion and closing it without Create is not an assistant action.

Learning reports and settings

Reports

Learning under Analytics has four tabs: Courses, Teams, Entities and Certificates. Pick an entity and a period (Last 90 days, This year, Last 12 months or All time) at the top. Show summary stats reveals the totals. Export downloads the report you choose as a CSV file.

A pill such as 3 gaps without courses appears next to Export when some of your people need a skill that no published course covers. Select it to open Gaps without courses, with each skill, how many people need it, their departments and how many asked for a course. How we count explains the rule: a gap is a skill the next level of someone's career path asks for at a higher level than they hold today, and it counts until a published course is linked to that skill. You see the people your reporting access covers. Course authors see Draft a course for this, which opens New course with the title, audience and linked skill filled in and Standard length chosen.

Learning settings

Learning under People settings holds two cards:

Certificate: the signatory name and title, and a note printed under the signature on every certificate.
Reminders and due dates: how many days before the due date reminders go out, and the default number of days to finish a course when a rule sets no due date.

Still need help? Reach us at [email protected].

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