Summary of how we handle departed staff

What we do

We never delete user accounts (with exceptions for test & duplicates accounts).

We keep all course pages (with exceptions of test & play/practice pages) and those not required or current become ‘archived’ in a Category that is not accessible by staff – but does means their Completion Status and Grade is still visible in their Record of Learning.

We use LDAP for authentication (currently Novell’s eDirectory but in next few months we move to Active Directory).  A field, populated from our HRMIS to LDAP, shows whether the account is ‘enabled’ or ‘disabled’ which we map to a custom field in the user profile. 

We sync to LDAP on each user login and sync overnight. Our LDAP process recently changed and departing staff are deleted from LDAP and not ‘disabled’.  We have an open request with our Totara partner to add a script that detects that a user account hasn’t matched an LDAP record over five successful sync’s and then marks the account as ‘disabled’.

We then use this field to hide ‘disabled’ staff in most areas where the view is via the Totara report builder e.g. My Team, reports by business group/unit, and custom reports about Trainer performance / groups of courses.

However, in our standard Moodle based reports (course page level Grades & Feedback summary etc) the users with the ‘disabled’ value are included and a column indicating the users status is shown.

Rationale

Like most Government Departments we are subject to questions in the house (our Parliament) on spend and time costs of training, seminars & conferences. In 1999 a Chief Executive was sacked over chartering a plane to transport staff to a conference in an upmarket venue (to be fair the venue was at a bargain price and she was mislead over the plane cost) but she had little data to back up her position (and  waited too long to explain to the media). While that’s 11 years ago opposition parties still explore this area of expenditure and we’re expected to be able to provide comprehensive data.

We also provide for internal audiences time based comparisons around training participation and outcomes.  These comparisons are very different if you exclude staff who have since left (we have high-ish turnover in the first 18 months but lower than average turnover after this length of service).

We re-hire staff – admittedly this is mostly fixed-term and contracting staff.  None the less we use the LMS to maintain records that they have completed our compulsory courses and required business specific courses. Deleting their records would mean having to run duplicate records of training participation and have the administrative cost of re-importing this data into the LMS.

We don’t show ‘disabled’ staff in Totara report builder views as the user tends to be accessing pre-formatted reports and often isn’t aware that is report based view. The reverse is true of the standard Moodle reports – as they are only accessible via those with administrative permissions and often as not want to include or compare data of staff who have left the organisation.



Cheers

Austen

It does seem a good idea to not delete data where possible but just to mark the record as deleted to allow the analysis of historic data.

Eventually this could lead to performance problems - what would be a good idea is to  store the non current data separate to the working database so analysis can be done on this without affecting performance of the Totara system (a data warehouse)

Has any thought been given on how to create a data warehouse for Totara and whether this might be worthwhile. I know its early days but probably needs to be thought about.

Craig

We work in helth care area.

We also keep all historical data for active and "deleted" users (more then 10 eyars).

In the reports we do not show any data about "deleted" users(except statistic).

We do not allow any operations with "deleted" users in the system.

But in case we rehire user he has all history information.

Thanks

Thank you Simon, That worked well!