Best practice forum (Archived)

Certifications: Updating compliance before window opens

Scenario:

Certification X contains 2 courses, one eLearning and one Face to Face. Either course will mark the certification as complete for 1 year, with a refresh window of 1 month.
Staff member Y completes the eLearning course for the certification on 5th September 2014, and is therefore marked as compliant until 5th September 2015.
On 5th March 2015, the member of staff attends the Face to Face course contained within the certification. Because the refresh window isn't open, the date doesn't change for the certification, and therefore the window is still due to open 5th August.
Come 5th August, the window opens and the activity and course completion records are reset by Totara. Staff member X's record of having attended the Face to Face session (and therefore extending their compliance to 5th March 2016) is lost.

Is this the expected situation (where, once the certification has been completed, it ignores updated data), and would it be possible to change it? We've only just launched certifications, but I can see this causing massive problems for us in the future. A lot of our statutory / mandatory training can be completed online as individual courses, or as part of Face to Face days which "bundle up" several different sessions. It's entirely possible that someone will need to refresh 4 of the 5 topics contained in the day, but the 5th topic still needs to be registered as having been updated.

Regards

Dan

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Hi Dan,

Firstly a gentle reminder that we do not really keep track of forum posts (it's almost impossible to do reliably) and if you are experiencing a difficulty you think may be a bug only tickets raised in the helpdesk are properly managed and tracked through to resolution.

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On your question, if a cert has two courses either of which is sufficient to be certified; either course can be done at any time; and whenever either is completed it recerts for another year, then setting the window to the same duration as the certification should work? As soon as they complete one course and are certified for a year the window should immediately open with a year to run, then it doesn't matter when they take the other course, they'll be recertified.

Not tested it but it sounds like it should work. But if it is an optional "do this course or the other and get certified for a year" why would people do the other optional course if their cert still had plenty of time to run?

If I am reading your last sentence properly, then are you saying some certifications will be set up something like this:

A subject has 5 topics you need to be proficient in. You have an e-learning course containing all 5 topics as separate activities, and a F2F session which covers all 5 (or alternatively 5 short F2F sessions on the same day, one for each topic). And you can mix-and-match across courses - you need all 5 but you could do 3 online and 2 in the F2F.

I can see how that would be a powerful tool though I think it would take a lot of work to get there from where we are at the minute. Definitely see it as a useful enhancement though.

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Thanks for the reminder, I know I have a tendency where it's unclear if something is a bug or a feature to try the forums first. Would it be possible for there to be a (read-only) access for subscribers to the bug tracker so we can see a) whether anyone else has reported a bug via their Solution Partner and b) what the status is of the fix?

Thanks for your suggestion of how to work around the fact that certifications could be completed at any time, might well look into that. If memory serves, there was some discussion about changing the settings for existing people in the certification (so the thousands of staff currently enrolled would all be updated to have the window the same length as the certification), what is the current status of that?

The setup is more the following:

Everyone must do 5 "core" topics.
There are 5 certifications, one for each topic.
Each certification includes one or more eLearning options and one or more Face to Face options.
One of the Face to Face options (which is included in each of the certification) is called "Core Training Day" and covers all 5 core topics. This is one Face to Face activity rather than a collection of 5 because the whole day is done as one rather than 5 sessions people can dip in and out of.
Some staff get "out of sync" with their core topics, so they don't all need refreshing at the same time. They might do a couple of eLearning courses and then a few months later do the "Core Training Day" which will cover the rest (but also should update the date for those topics which were previously done via eLearning).

Regards

Dan

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