Getting the Most of Your Sandbox Trial Account

Now that you've gotten access to your Academy of Mine Sandbox account, you can dive into our platform to test out the features and learn the ins and outs to see if it'll be a good fit for your business. To make the most of your trial account, we have a few recommendations of what core features to explore and tutorials to go along with them. 

You can also check out this handy video tour that walks through the Admin Dashboard and gives a high-level overview of how the functions all fit together. Together with the pointers below, it will help you get acquainted with the platform and how to configure it for your business needs. 

Add Your Team

If there will be others on your team who will be testing out the Sandbox with you, be sure to add them to the account so they can explore.  You can add new users with different roles and specific permissions depending on their access requirements. Generally, all users on your team should be added as Admins, so they will have access to the entire platform and will be able to make changes. Other user roles include Instructors (who teach material, create content and offer live webinar trainings), Group Admins (admins of a specific group) and Students (those who will be taking your courses). 

For more details information about adding users, please follow our guide: Adding a User. 

Customize Your Branding

You can customize the branding for your platform so that it represents your business and students feel like they're on  your platform! You can add your company logo, which will be displayed in multiple locations throughout the platform, as well as change the colors seen on the platform to match your company’s brand. Further add your branding by inserting custom headers and footers--these can include a contact email address and phone number, and a custom copyright notice. You can even add custom CSS to closer mirror your company's branding when it comes to text sizes, introducing new layout options, changing the formatting of pages, and more. 

To learn how to make those branding changes, review our custom branding guide: Customize Your Branding.

Build a Course

Courses are the core of your platform, and likely why you're signing up for an LMS in the first place! They are what drive all activity on the platform and it is how you bring your content to students and organizations. Creating a course will help you understand how our courses are set up and how that aligns with your course material. Be sure to utilize our "view as a student" functionality once you've created your course and enrolled yourself as well, to truly understand what the student side of things will look like. 

AOM offers both Self Paced and Instructor Led courses. The difference between this is how the material is presented to the students, and therefore, each type is built a different way.

• Self Paced Courses are where you combine all the educational material you have built into one package that students can access and take online, without being in a class led by an instructor. The material of a course is built up out of different modules (such as videos, PDFs, SCORMs, text, PowerPoints, webinars and more) which together create the curriculum. Once you have built out the content of your course, you can attach a certificate which students receive upon completion, if they match or exceed the criteria that you specify. For self-paced courses, you'll create your modules and then add them to a course. 
• Instructor Led Courses are made up of classes instead of modules. The classes each have a date, time and location that they are offered and the student will attend the classes. The location can be both in-person, or virtual (via one of our webinar provider integrations such as Zoom, GoTo Training or GoTo Webinar).