Terminology
Tangible Cred is a highly flexible and automated system, and so it must map many concepts common to accredited training in order to meet even common use-cases. There are many data structures and concepts built into the plugin as a result. You can learn the basics of what these data structures are and their intended purpose here.
Accrediting Agency
An accrediting agency is an organizational structure that may represent a Licensing or Certifying board. It contains rules for license types and other user-to-accrediting-body relationship metadata, as well as defaults for accreditations issued by that accrediting agency, such as allowed point types. It is associated with regions and with professions. Professional codes can be overwritten when linking a profession to an accrediting agency.
Accreditation
An accreditation is a grouping of rules for point earning. Each accreditation is associated with one Accrediting Agency, and may contain multiple earning events.
Certificate
A certificate is a document delivered to the user based on the information stored in an earned accreditation.
Earning Event
An earning event is a single rule within an accreditation. It contains an event trigger which is often used to connect it to a course within an LMS, limitations around which professions the earning event should trigger for, custom metadata and scheduled content codes, as well as definitions for earned points of each available type.
Earned Accreditation
An earned accreditation is an instance of a user earning an accreditation. A user earns an earned accreditation when they trigger an action and meet all required criteria (agency relationships, professions, etc.)
Default Earned Accreditation
A default earned accreditation is an earned accreditation that is issued regardless of a users' particular criteria. You may think of it as a proof of completion. Users may be allowed to download certificates associated with these default earned accreditations, but their primary system purpose is as a log of all relevant actions taken by users in the system, which allows data backfills when users create new agency relationships and prevent data loss due to misconfiguration.
License Type
A license type is a configuration stored on an accrediting agency. It contains a license name, an optional prefix, suffix, and mask, an association with professions and regions, and the option to collect a renewal date.
Point Type
A point type is a bit like a currency, issued to users in return for completing actions on the platform. Many sites will only use one point type to track generic continuing education hours, but in cases where some regions approve courses for a different amount of continuing education points, adding additional point types allows tracking of unique values for these region-specific course approvals.
Profession
A profession in Tangible Cred is a description of the sort of work a person has special training to carry out. Professions are associated with Accrediting Agencies and automatically applied to users based on the licenses they register in the system.
Professional Code
A professional code is a short alphanumeric string that is stored alongside an Accrediting Agency's relationship with a profession. Many regions use the codes RN or R, for example, to refer to register nurses.
Region
A region is a part of the world.
Zone
A zone is a country, or another collection of regions.