Best practice forum (Archived)

A simple solution for qualifications?

 
Sue Page
A simple solution for qualifications?
by Sue Page - Monday, 14 November 2016, 6:10 PM
 

Is there a simple way to record (and report on) qualifications obtained by employees? We have Totara as a pilot (Cloud-based) and I use it to deliver SCORM packaged technical training to our sales team. We have no internal support for this service and it's about 5% of my day job, so I am no expert. We would now like to extend its use to record qualifications such as first aid certificates (with a renewal option), 4WD training, advanced driver training, etc. Most of these are one-off pieces of training delivered by external parties. We don't want to provide links to face-to-face courses as we have staff all over the country and no admin support to manage this.

I tried certifications for the first aid, but ran into issues because of the need to identify an activity type. I chose face-to-face, but it just keeps making me schedule sessions. I only want to check a box that says Person X has completed this on Y date and have the system tell them a year from now they need to do it again.

I looked at adding evidence for the other certificates, but that just seems messy. I'd like to be able to have a predetermined list of common qualifications that can be attributed to people as they achieve them.

Can this be done? I suspect there is an easy answer, but Totara is such a complex beast when you don't use it very often. Any help will be much appreciated.

Nathan Lewis
Re: A simple solution for qualifications?
by Nathan Lewis - Monday, 14 November 2016, 6:30 PM
Group Totara

Hi Sue.

Perhaps you could create a certification with a course which contains no activities, and set course completion to be based on manual completion by a manager (or some similar criteria). Then, either the manager can mark the user complete, or you could import course or certification completion data (one or the other, just don't import both) to indicate that the user completed the qualification. One drawback is that it isn't very obvious what the source qualification is - it would simply say that the user completed it on a certain date and that they are due to do it again on another date.

Nathan

Jani Lemmetyinen
Re: A simple solution for qualifications?
by Jani Lemmetyinen - Monday, 14 November 2016, 11:34 PM
 

Hi,

Here's one possible solution.

Create single activity type courses, one course per qualification. Choose activity type: assignment activity. In Assignment settings > Submission types choose "Upload files ". Then use this activity as course completion criteria, and create certifications by using these courses.

Employees are then required to upload their (external) certificate documents into Totara - e.g. take a photo of driver's training licence (if no other kind of file is available). There is good documentation about Assignment activity available in Moodle Docs.

Regards,

Jani

Sue Page
Re: A simple solution for qualifications?
by Sue Page - Tuesday, 15 November 2016, 12:39 PM
 

Thanks Jani, I'll give this a go. It sounds like it should work!