Overview
You may choose to add Learners to your tenant who are not real learners on programme, but are created to test configuration or product changes. Aptem refers to such Learners as "Test Learners." Test Learners are excluded from billing, and you will not be charged for them, providing that they ensure that Test Learners are identified accurately.
If any of the criteria are not followed, Aptem will automatically bill for Learners in the system on a monthly basis per the agreement in place with you.
Configuring Test Learners
When adding a Test Learner to your Aptem tenant, the following rules apply:
Learner Naming
When naming a Test Learner you should create a Learner account, but ensure that the First Name and Surname follow the defined convention below.
Learner First Name
You should set the learner first name to distinguish Test Learners where you have multiple use cases you are testing i.e. "New Programme" or "ST3084 Standard". Where you require multiple Test Learners for the same use case you may include numbers to uniquely identify specific Test Learners i.e. "New Programme 1...5".
Learner Surname
You must set the learner surname to "TEST". This must be UPPERCASE and must not be pre-fixed or post-fixed with any other words or characters.
Learner Grouping
You should do the following:
- Create a Test Group to facilitate identification and ongoing management. See: Creating a Group Structure.
- Add all Test learners to the test Group. This also facilitates exclusion from batch exporting and reporting. See: Adding a learner to one or more groups.
Exclusion from Batch
On the Individual learner record, you should mark Test Learners as being excluded from batch exports.
Active Management
We understand the importance of keeping your user list clear and well-maintained. However, deleting test users purely for housekeeping can lead to avoidable issues. The following guidance explains why retaining test users is often the more practical approach, along with suggestions for staying organised without losing valuable testing data.
- Test users are meant for reuse: Test users are typically configured with specific roles, permissions, or settings to replicate real-world scenarios. Once set up, they can be reused across multiple test cycles — saving time and maintaining consistency. Removing them may result in the need to recreate the same configurations later, which can be inefficient.
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Keeping things tidy without deleting - Instead of deleting test users, consider the following:
- Renaming them to make their purpose clear.
- Grouping them separately from active users.
- Archiving or deactivating them to remove them from day-to-day views while retaining access when needed.
This approach allows you to maintain a clean and organised user list without losing useful test data.