Hi there
With the latest release of Totara ... a few questions:
HI Both,
This is something I am also wanting to do.
On the link you supplied it shows how to Set up a Recurring Course within a programme!
Are you able to do this for courses that are not in a programme?
Many Thanks
Chelle
Hi All,
We want exactly the same thing but have found that the recurring programs feature has a few issues that make make it less useful than it at first appears.
Firstly the course is not visible to the user unless they click through to the record of learning, courses will not appear in the course completion block unless they have already been started.
We have got round this with front page link to the programs section of the record of learning but have found any additional click required will lose us user engagement.
Additionally the course itself expires at the end of the number of days that you select, this then creates a new course and mails everybody to tell them to repeat the course. all at once, to 8000 people, some of which have only just completed the course but have the misfortune to be close to the date the course automatically recreates itself. We dont need any more angry emails from our medical staff.
A far better solution would be to blast the completion data for that user at the point that the course expires and then have a 0 day email send to the user asking them to complete. This could work in a very similar way to the badge expiry function that lets you set a dynamic date in days and the ability to refresh this by re-taking the course.
The work-arounds for this they are ugly, a convoluted task of reporting, unenrolling and reenrollng on a new version of the course on a weekly basis, highly admin intensive and with a huge potential for error.
Our Totara partner (webanywhere) has written a plugin for moodle that accompolishes all of this and more and we are investigating having this ported to 2.4 but the expense and support arrangements will be substantial.
Has anybody found a way round these problems? Is Totara planning on fixing what should be a vital function in a corporate environment?
Regards,
Russell Jackson
University College Hospitals London
It should also be noted that this feature is not just required by us and our 12500 users, every NHS institution will have the same issue when using Totara/Moodle. To fix this will make this platform very attractive to individual NHS organisations, thats 1.7 million full time employees and probably another million agency, honorary and research positions.
Thats a huge market in the UK alone, other similar organisations will have the same requirements world wide.
Surely worth a little development?
Regards,
Russell
I would like to add a very big +1 to this as another NHS staff member with another 8,500 employees in his organisation, all of whom will have courses which need repeating on a regular basis. Ideally what we would need is the ability to handle recurring courses (or even competencies) without any workarounds or manual intervention, and reporting linked to this functionality so that staff compliance can be assessed at individual/team/department/Trust level.
Not having this means that we need to have an additional system which can crunch data and provide the reporting information, and if nothing else that weakens the argument for Totara being the single system solution to our requirements. There are already companies marketing solutions which handle eLearning, compliance and reporting and have a nice friendly "Microsoft Partner" badge attached who are specifically targetting NHS Trusts because they know how big and lucrative a market this could be and how important an integrated solution is.
+1
Hi everyone,
Thanks very much for the detailed feedback. I just wanted to let you know that it is being listened to - improving this area of Totara is a really high priority for us and we are working on it at the moment. It is also quite a complex feature though so we want to make sure we take the time to do it right.
We agree that restoring a copy of the course is not the best approach (for the reasons that Russell mentioned). Ideally the course could be ongoing over many years with users enrolled, unenrolled, then reenrolled when they are required to do it.
The difficulty is that to allow them to repeat the course we need to reset it for them to remove their previous attempts. This involves deleting or archiving data from (potentially) any activity that might be used in the course. Some modules (like quizzes) support multiple attempts while others don't. We also need to handle archiving of old grades and course completion records.
The good news is that development is underway and we expect to have this functionality in the next release (2.5, due Sept/Oct). You'll be able to set up "Certifications" which initially will be based on programs, but we plan to expand it to work with individual courses and competencies after that.
Simon
Thanks all for the comments.
Look forward to seeing it in the next release.
Hi All,
This is great news.
I appreciate there are many different elements to this and also thinking about records retention and reporting and also over writting previous results etc.
One question I would just like to ask is, will the course show everytime they have completed in the Learning Plan and Reprot?
For example, if they have to complete H & S in 2012, and again in 2012, 2013 etc. will all the entries show in the Learning Plan so the learner has a full record of them completing the course in that year? Was just thinking about if you enrol, unerol etc.if the info will still be visable for Learning Plan and if we wanted to go back a run a report for all those who completed in 2012?
Thanks
Chelle
Yes the record of learning will retain history of past completions. The intention is that the normal course completion report will contain the most recent completion, but with a column indicating the number of past completions which will link to another report giving details of past completions for that course and user.
Simon
