Best practice forum (Archived)

Fully Attending staff in version 2.7

Hi,

Hoping to upgrade to 2.7 in a few weeks and just discovered that when you 'Fully Attend' someone to a session it now does this instantly and gives an instant course completion without the safety net of a 'Save' or 'Cancel' button.

If you have made a mistake and then go back to change the status immediately it does amend the f2f status but does not remove the course completion. As Admin we also do not have the ability to remove the course completion (or indeed the certification completion should this be necessary).

My feeling is that this is really dangerous and we really need the 'Save' & 'Cancel' buttons back as a safety net and also the ability to remove both course & certification completions.

Not sure what others think or if anyone has found a way around this problem? (or if indeed there is another string in the forums which I have missed relating to this)

Kind regards
Steph

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We have definitely hit this issue, and the related fact that changing someone's status later on (so this applies to all previous versions of Totara) doesn't recalculate the activity / course / certification completion. While most activities stay completed once they are done, I think Face to Face is a special case; there should be the possibility of "uncompleting" (on change of session attendance status) the activity and forcing the course to recheck whether the completion criteria are still met. Where I can see this breaking down is programs and certifications which include the course, because "uncompleting" those is going to be tricky once they are completed I think.

What we've ended up having to do to get course completion status correct is delete the face to face completion data and force Totara to re-create it from previous attendances. This then forces the course completion data to also be regenerated. Not a perfect solution by any means, and I've not tried it on a course which is part of a certification (and therefore might have multiple completions of a Face to Face course), but may be a way to "fix" the data.

Dan

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Hi folks,

We are aware of these issues and are planning to take steps in 9.0 which will go a fair way in addressing the points you've raised:

The features under consideration for 9.0 are:

TL-4156 Give admin the capability to edit and delete course completion records.

TL-7034 Give Site Admin the ability to edit and delete Program/Certification completion records.

These features are being spec'd to provide the ability to add, edit and delete completion records, give a better interface for bulk changes and provide a way to see and decide upon the consequences of each action and secondary actions that a change will cause in related activities.

It's not a small task as there are numerous and varied implications to consider when allowing changes to completion records but there is a recognised need to allow people to fix mistakes and errors in the data that may be introduced by setup, process or software issues.

A significant aspect of these features is to provide a clear and consistent method of correction over the currently confusing and inconsistent behaviour of uploading certification and course completion records, which is often used in an attempt to correct data errors.

Further information about the 9.0 release will become available after the release of 2.9.

I think perhaps one way to head of potential problems in the meantime would be to use "Condition: Manual completion by others" as part of the completion criteria of the session.

regards,

George.

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Hi George,

Thanks for the response and appreciate the work which will be needed to give admin the ability to amend/delete course & certification information however what is currently making this issue so problematic is the removal of the 'Save' & 'Cancel' buttons from the attendance tab.

There is absolutely no room left for error so if someone accidentally clicks on the wrong item from the drop down there isn't even time for them to re-click and choose the correct item immediately before the first click is registered.

Please can we have the 'Save' & 'Cancel' buttons back in the interim - when is 2.9 due for release.

Thanks
Steph

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Hi Steph,

Ive filed an enhancement for the return of the buttons - TL-7602, it shouldnt take too long (but it wont make next week's release). 2.9 is due in approximately a month.

Cheers,

George.

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Thanks George, that's great news

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Hi Dan,

Thanks for your comment - what do you mean by delete the face to face completion data, do you mean cancelling the member of staff from the course and then waiting for the data to re-aggregate?

We're still on 2.5 and just looking at 2.7 so I haven't got my head around Scheduled Tasks yet??

S...

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Deleting completion data by going into the Face to Face activity, going to "Edit Settings", clicking the "Unlock completion and delete completion data" button and then "Save and return to course". That will then force the activity to recreate all of the completion data based on whether someone's current status is "Fully Attended" or not, which also forces the course completion to be recalculated. As I say, not sure how that would interact with programs / certifications. Our usual workflow is to run off a course completion status report before resetting the data, and then one after, and comparing the two in Excel to check what changes have occurred.

Worth saying we were doing this on 2.6 and now 2.7, but I don't know how 2.5 handles activity / course completion.

Dan

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Interesting, never tried that but it certainly makes sense - just as a quick thought, I'm presuming this won't delete any course completion data which has been imported via csv upload??

S...

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Not actually sure of the answer to that, worth doing some testing first! I know where I want to "reset" the status of one individual so it reflects the activity completion, you can also RPL complete them for the course (assuming the course isn't part of program/certification...) and then remove the RPL completion. This will then cause the system to check whether they meet the course completion criteria. This is useful where the course was previously set to "Mark as In Progress on first view" and now isn't, because it allows you to remove the half completed status for courses that were enrolled in but nothing was completed so they no longer show up on the staff member's record of learning once they unenrol.

Dan

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A fix for TL-7602 - Re-enable Save and cancel button for f2f attendance tab has been included in Totara 2.7.9 and 2.9.1 which were released on November 17, 2015.

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