Tech Foundations

Tech Foundations provides learners with an understanding of what a technology is, how it’s applied, why it matters, and how to use it.

Introduction to Tech Foundations

Tech Foundations is a curation experience that includes a video course and assessment for important technology topics. Tech Foundations can give learners the digital fluency to engage in key technical conversations.

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Getting started for admin

Tech Foundations is sold as a standalone license. You can purchase licenses to be used by themselves or to be used in conjunction with Skills licenses.

If you already have a Skills plan, reach out to your Pluralsight contact for more information about purchasing Tech Foundations licenses in addition to your Skills licenses. If you are new to Pluralsight and would like to set up a plan with Tech Foundations, please contact Pluralsight Sales (opens email form).

For more information about laying the groundwork for success, inviting your learners, and leveraging analytics, see the Admin success center for Tech Foundations.

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Getting started for learners

Logging in

See Accepting a team plan invite to learn how to set up your account. If you’ve been assigned to a single-sign on (SSO) by your company, see Logging in to Skills using SSO.

Accessing Tech Foundations

1. Click Home on the navigation bar.
2. Click View all topics on the Tech Foundations widget.
3. Choose a topic from the Tech Foundations curation page.
4. Choose to watch the topic video or take the assessment.

You can also choose from selected topics on the Tech Foundations widget on the home page. Once you've made a selection, continue on your learning journey.

Tech Foundations topic videos and assessments are also available on our mobile apps. Visit the downloads page (opens in new tab) to download the app and start learning.

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Tech Foundations features

Each topic consists of two components: an optional topic video and an assessment. You can take the assessment before and/or after watching the topic video.

Admins within your organization will be able to see your assessment status (pass, fail, none) and video watch time, if you choose to watch any topic videos. See Pluralsight and data protection to learn how our privacy notice protects your data.

Topic videos

The topic videos are made specifically for Tech Foundations and cover each topic in broad terms. Each topic video is between 30 and 60 minutes and is broken down into sections, allowing you to review specific areas of a topic.

Viewing the topic video is optional. If you feel confident in a topic or you want to see your progress before and after viewing the video, you can skip ahead and take the assessment. 

The video player has several features designed to help you customize your learning experience. Please see Video player for best practices, including language settings, captions, playback speed, and more.

Topic Assessments

Each 15-question assessment is scored as pass or fail. The number of correct answers required to pass varies by topic. You aren’t timed while taking the assessment.

If you pass the assessment, choose your next topic and continue learning. You won’t be able to take the assessment again once you’ve passed it. Each time you pass a topic assessment, you'll receive one point towards your program progress. 

If you didn’t pass the assessment, you’ll see topic concepts that you need to review. These concepts are linked to timestamped sections within the topic video, allowing you to refresh your knowledge and prepare for another assessment attempt. To protect Tech Foundations’ question bank, you won’t be able to see the correct answers.

Each assessment allows you two attempts to pass it during a 24-hour period. If you have no remaining attempts, the assessment button will be disabled. The assessment button will show you how much time is remaining until you can attempt the assessment again.

If you start an assessment and you're inactive from the assessment for more than 72 hours, you’ll need to start over with a new attempt. Once you pass an assessment, you won’t be able to retake it.

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Troubleshooting and accessibility

Assessment accessibility

Tech Foundations assessments have been designed with screen readers in mind. To take an assessment using a screen reader:

1. Navigate to a topic and open a topic assessment.
2. Start the assessment.
3. Tab into the question. The screen reader will announce the question number out of total questions. The screen reader will then read the question aloud.
4. Tab into the first answer. The screen reader will announce the answer text followed by the answer number out of total answer options for that question.
5. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between answers. The screen reader will announce the answer text each time. When the screen reader announces the answer text, that answer is selected.
6. Remain on your chosen answer and press tab twice to navigate to the Submit Answer button.
   

   Note: Tabbing once will read a link which asks you to submit feedback regarding the content on the page.

7. Press enter/return on your keyboard to submit your answer. You’ll be taken to the next question.
8. Repeat previous steps until assessment is completed.

Errors

If you experience an error, try the following:

Advanced troubleshooting

If you're having trouble with Skills and haven't been able to resolve your issue, you can try some advanced troubleshooting using your browser's diagnostic tool and send the results to Support.

To run your browser's diagnostic tool:

1. Open our video player or the assessment in your desktop browser, then open your browser's diagnostic tools (CMD-OPTION-S on Mac, or F12 on PC).
2. Go to the Console tab, then reload or refresh the page.
3. Take a screenshot of any errors that show up under the Console tab.
4. Navigate to the Network tab, refresh again to get the Network tab to populate, and take another screenshot.

Please contact Pluralsight Support with those screenshots and the details of your problem so we can look into this further for you.