Best practice forum (Archived)

Certification with imported course completion

Hi All,

I'm trying to assist a client with setting up a recurring certification. They have been tracking user completion data for certain things outside of the LMS. For example First aid. They now want to bring this into Totara and make it a Certification. Which all sounds sane to me and what Certification functionality should provide.

The scenario is this:

A course already exists in Totara for "first aid"
User completions are uploaded via "Upload completion Records"
- This enrols the user in the course if required
- Users are marked as complete via RPL in the course (I can very this in the course level completion report). The correct dates are shown as per the import
They want the first aid course to form a Certification where the re-certification path is the same as the certification path. Consisting of only the "first aid" course that has the imported user completions.
They want the certification expiry to be based on 1 year from the users date of completion as defined by the imported data.

However, I'm unable to get this to work. Some of the imported dates will be more than 12 months old, so these users should have expired certifications and be overdue to complete. Some users should be valid as it has been less than 12months since they completed the course. Finally, some users should have not been expired yet but are within the 1 month window to redo the certification.

I feel like I'm missing something basic here, I've been through the docs and these forums but have been unable to find the missing piece. Are there any course of certification level setting I should be paying particular attention to in order to get this working?

Kind Regards,

Matt Porritt

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Hi Matt,

Could you tell us exactly what you are seeing? Are you getting an error message? Have you run cron? If you can give us more information that would be very helpful.

Many thanks,

George.

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Hi George,

I'm not getting error messages (which is a good thing), It's more about expected behavior I think. The Totara version I'm testing on is 2.6.5, but can happily upgrade it to 2.6 latest.

I created a new course this morning that has a start date of 2014-01-01, with completion enabled.I imported 3 users into the course with completion dates of 2014-02-01, 2014-03-01 & 2014-12-01.
A certification was created with the course above as the certification path and re-certification path. The 3 imported users where added as individuals. Certification is active for 1 year, expiration window is 1 month, re-certification date is expiry.

Cron is ticking along without issue.

When I check the check the record of learning for all certifications (totara/plan/record/certifications.php) for each user, the information for the created certification is all the same: Status = Assigned, Renewal Status = not due for renewal. I would have thought the first two users would be due for re-certification? Also there is nothing in the previous completions column.

Am I way off with the expected behavior here?

Cheers,
Matt P

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Hi Matt,

Would the bug Craig mentioned here have any impact on what you are experiencing?

cheers,

George.

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Hi George,

I don't think they are related. I've had a look at the entries in table mdl_course_completions and everything looks like I'd expect.

i.e.
id | userid | timeenrolled | timestarted | timecompleted | rpl | rplgrade | status | renewalstatus|
16 | 6 | 1393592400 | 1393592400 | 1393592400 | Completion history import - imported grade = 75 | 75.00000 | 75 | 0

I think some of my issue is related to CRON impatience. I checked the record of learning for the users I setup in the test certification on Friday and their status's have changed. I'll do some more testing and let you know.

In the mean time how often does Totara update cetification completions in 2.6? Is it per cron run or on the hourly or daily cron?

Cheers,

Matt P

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Hi Matt,

It runs hourly - you should see this in the cron log ""No need to run certification hourly cron - has already been run recently", it runs an hour after the last time it ran. The relevant code is in Totarax.x>totara>certification>cron.php

cheers,

George.

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