Best practice forum (Archived)

Concept of ‘Failure’ in the LMS

 
Austen Sinclair
Concept of ‘Failure’ in the LMS
by Austen Sinclair - Wednesday, 17 August 2011, 7:02 PM
Group PartnersGroup TXP Site Administrator

If you don't think is an appropriate use of the support forum do mention this and I'll stop!

I wanted to test the understanding and practices of other business Totara users on how they record when a staff member has ‘failed’ a course.

Our site might be at an extreme end of this. Currently, our use of Totara is of:

  • open enrolments to all course pages - we even suppress the ‘are you sure’ you want to enrol message,
  • we do not have any time constraints on courses – we don’t have enrolment ending after a period of time,
  • we do not allow a set number of attempts in assessments (if you’re interested I post the reason in a separate post),
  • staff with a grade less than the set pass mark (normally 80%) simply show a status of ‘In progress’, and
  • The course status of ‘Complete’ can only be achieved by successfully completing the course requirements.

This has worked well for the last six years! (we were a Moodle site first)

We now have a suite of courses managed through the LMS where staff only get one chance at undertaking them. They are generally expensive externally facilitated courses where there is competition to gain a place on the course. Staff who do not complete these courses have a status of ‘in progress’ which is seen as inadequate to describe their actual status and has introduced an administrative workload related to staff and their team leaders seeking to restart/re-submit/re-admit them in the course.

So, what do other Totara users do?

Cheers

Austen

 
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Austen Sinclair
Concept of ‘Failure’ in the LMS - proposed solution
by Austen Sinclair - Thursday, 18 August 2011, 8:20 PM
Group PartnersGroup TXP Site Administrator
Just updating the post yesterday about recording a 'Fail' type of course status.


So, to be clear, this a course status to reflect that the staff member has not achieved the required score and no longer has the opportunity to re-attempt the course
 
The key Totara issue is that 'Completion' means successfully completing a course and can't be revoked. This is good design.  We have historically had all manner of problems in reporting completions when staff re-attempt online modules they had already passed to simply achieve a higher pass mark. This  resulted in being a 'new' completion (mucking up current period reporting) and also changes the date of original pass (mucking up historical comparisons).
 
The proposed solution is to treat 'Completed, not successfully' as a special case of the existing 'In progress' course status. Which would result in the following Course status range of:
  1. Not Started,  (course grade is nul AND no required activities are completed)


  2. In progress, (course grade >0 OR one or more required activities are completed)


  3. Completed, not successfully,  (manually set for each individual, system associates date to this)


  4. Completed, (system assigned when course grade > 'pass mark' OR all required activities are completed) This status overrides any other status already recorded for the staff member.

We've awaiting a quote from our Totara partner and we have the expectation of implementing this at the end of September.

Would still really like to hear what other Totara users do in this space.

Cheers
Austen

 
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