This article describes learning paths in Cloud Academy. This feature is available to personal and enterprise users.

This document contains the following sections:

• What Are Learning Paths
• Learning Path Progress
• How to Start a Learning Path
• How to Complete a Learning Path

What Are Learning Paths

Learning paths are objective-driven learning experiences that combine the theory, technical knowledge, and hands-on practice to master skills using industry-leading technologies and major cloud platforms. Our learning paths can contain:

• Courses
• Quizzes and exams
• Hands-on labs
• Lab challenges
• Playground labs
• Practice certifications exams

An exam follows each learning path to ensure that learners are acquiring key concepts and skills. When you complete a learning path, you can download a certificate of completion.

Cloud Academy has built and maintains a broad and deep library of learning paths for you to choose from. Enterprise users can also create custom learning paths using Content Engine.

Learning Path Progress

Once you start a learning path, it appears on your dashboard and shows your progress through the learning path.

If you had previously completed any of the learning path courses outside of the learning path, the progress reflects those courses as already complete. However, until you start the learning path, the progress always shows 0% progress.

Tip: If you're having trouble getting a learning path to acknowledge a video course as complete, try letting the loading indicator complete before leaving the screen. See Video Player Controls article for more information.

How to Start a Learning Path

Note: If you're a member of an enterprise account, you may have learning paths assigned to you by your administrator or team leader as part of a Training Plan.

You can find learning paths in the training library. Once you select a topic in the list on the left, you see the option to list the learning paths for that topic.

If you use the search tool in the training library, you can filter the search results for learning paths. You can identify a learning path by the icon to the left of the search result.

Click the learning path to see the detail view:

On this screen you can see details like the difficulty level and length to help you decide whether this is the learning path you want to start. If you scroll down on this screen, you can see a list of the steps.

When you're ready, click the Start Learning Path button to begin.

How to Complete a Learning Path

The traditional way to complete a learning path is to complete each item in turn until you reach the end of the path. However, you might already have expertise on the subject of the learning path. Or the content of a course in the learning path might have been updated after you completed the course but before you finished the whole learning path.

To avoid requiring you to finish courses on a subject you already know or retake a slightly modified course, the system lets you confirm your competency by finishing the final assessments.

In this case, "assessments" refers to exams and lab challenges. A learning path can contain any number of assessments, but you only need to pass those at the end of the learning path to complete the learning path.

When the last n items in a learning path are assessments, and the n-1 item in the learning path is not an assessment, then the n-1 item is the last of the optional items in the learning path. Successfully completing everything after that last non-assessment item is required to complete the learning path.

In other words, if you start from the bottom of the list and work your way up until you get to the first thing that isn't an assessment, that's the last item that's optional. Everything after that you have to complete successfully for the system to consider the learning path complete.