Best practice forum (Archived) - Marking attendance in Facetoface session

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Marking attendance in Facetoface session

Morning all,

We have just had to delay roll out of face to face sessions due to a very strange "Feature" in Totara.

When marking attendance for a face to face session we have found that the completion date is set as the date the attendance was marked rather than the date of the session.

In a perfect world our trainers would mark these as they happen but as much of the training is performed on wards scattered over seven hospitals this cannot always be the case, indeed sometimes the sign in sheets can take weeks to be entered into the system.

Our suppliers (Webanywhere) have provided us a tool to upload completion time against the container for a course and using this in conjunction with the session attendance report we can transpose the date of the session for the date the attendance was marked in the system but this seems a very clumsy way for something that should just use the session date everytime.

Is their any plan to provide a way to force the system to use the session date or does anybody have a better way of getting round this issues?

In another industry a day or two difference in the dates would not be critical but the audit trail we have to provide for all training to the CQC and NHS litigation authority has to be absolutely precise in case somebody decides to try to sue us!

Regards,

Russell Jackson

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Hi,

Just to second Russell on this; it's causing reporting problems for us too. It definitely makes 'educational' sense that the F2F Session date should be the Course completion date, doesn't it?

We're finding inaccuracies/confusion in Programme completion reports as a result of this issue (which tend to be high-profile, mandatory, organisational KPI topics).

Would it be possible to look at changing the logic?

Many thanks indeed,

Matt

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Hi,

There is a report source Face-face sessions source, is it possible to use this as a workaround? There are problems if the F2F is not the only criteria within the course which indicates completion.

regards,

George.

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Hi George

Whilst the work around is great for general reporting on F2F session attenance, it wont work for NHS audit requirements.

F2F session completions (fully attended) linked to renewal periods are requried for NHS audit, and a paper attendance sheet may be left in an in-tray for days /weeks, before it is input. Having the most recent F2F session date that is marked as 'fully attended' is key to the reporting requirements.

As the F2F updates the Course completion, which in turn updates the Programme and the new module due in 2.5, which both manage the renewal periods, the F2F date is key to this.

Whilst the course completion criteria is linked to several activities, when marking attendance on F2F sessions the relevant date is the session date and not the date it was marked - which due to admin priorities and maybe extended leave periods when administrators are not available to data input, are not reliable.

Can a change be looked to change how the completion 'date' in F2F is managed as a priority please, I would assume that it must affect more clients that just NHS where compliance reporting is needed?

Thanks

Richard

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Hi We too are a NHS organisation and have run into the same problem. Similar to Russell we have many training activities across many sites. We are in the process of importing and setting up retrospective data for mandatory compliance. What Totara is pulling through is the date we set the course up. Therefore the fact that we are putting into the system that someone attended a face to face session for “topic A” six months ago it is showing that their course is complete as of today. We cannot use this data in a meaningful way and do not have the workaround tool. As we have over 15000 staff that need tracking around 65 courses with about 250,000 lines of retrospective data this issues has had a big impact on our current roll out. We need to show which staff have completed a particular program that their audience has assigned them to. We are not using recurring programs as we have been asked to await 2.5 for this to be “smoother”. A project milestone is to produce a compliance report and this is looking unlikely. To echo Russell “does anybody have a better way of getting round this issues?” or indeed for us any way? Rob

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Hey Rob, we too have had a similar issue with the completion dates. The majority of our courses are compliance related and require an actual date of completion. I have been told that there is no manual over-ride of the completion date so this is the solution we came up with - looking at reporting setup.

Reporting

1. Completion Reports

Column = Course Completion (renamed to "Date Administered (offline) / Date Completed (online)")
Column = Course Type (renamed to Online / Offline) this showing the computer or people symbols

If it is an offline (like a face-to-face or offline assignment) then the administrators know to get the actual completion date they need to refer to a different report

2. Learning Activity Reports

Face-to-Face learning activity report which has the ability to show the actual date of completion.

I know this is not what you are after however with the restrictions of completion I have had to relook at the reporting setup to make this work for us.

Hope this helps

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Our organisation would like this feature as well. Just to add to the weight of the request! It is actually not a small thing and we have found it a significant problem at times when our users expect to see the correct date. The report work around is a possiblility but not fabulous.

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I absolutely agree. The ability alter completion dates to actual would assist us greatly as everything I do is historic with dates needing show actual.

This is not just for Face-to-Face learning activities. A learning activity or over-ride function where an administrator can enter the completion date against a learner would also be beneficial.

At the moment to do this we use Offline Assignment learning activity and use the comments field (free text) to enter the date of completion against a learner. We then use the Assignment Report to track actual completion showing the comments field.

I have definitely sharpened my excel vlookups skills to combine reports which is not ideal.

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My tuppence worth - it's good to see we're not alone... and also remarkable to see the various workarounds.

When we set up our system 18mths ago we had Totara 1.9. We manually entered retrospective data from numerous fields for over 1000 users, to try and capture compliance requirements for audit purposes - we used RPL text entry to do this.

We encountered many issues with RPL info not 'sticking' (and so cross-checked all the entries x 2 and re-entered many - a massive task), but could at least hover over the green bar to view the text entered to see actual dates completed. The RPL text could also be viewed in one of the reports ('Completed Learning' I think from memory).

However... since we've upgraded to 2.4, even more of the info has 'disappeared' from RPL records... and the text entered can no longer be viewed by hovering over the green bar - it just indicates 'RPL'. Fortunately we still have some previous completions in various forms to cross-check, but this negates one of the primary reasons we shifted to Totara in the first place... to meet compliance-based recording expectations from audit and certification purposes...

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Hi Kitty

I think you are referring to the completed Learning report - the RPL details don't show when I hover over the RPL but there is a column to the right of this with two dots Show RPL that when clicked will show all text eneterred in the RPL field.

I am using v2.4.8

RPL detail

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We are using 2.4.5 and do not have the helpful two little dots....

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Hi Suzanne

I checked in version Totara 1.1 and the dots appeared, are you using the course report - Course completion progress report ?

I tried in Chrome, IE and Firefox so don't think it is a browser issue.

Can you try and select a standard Totara theme to see if it is a theme issue.

Craig

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Hi Craig - just to clarify, because sometimes these "threads" get a bit thin. Pre 2.4 we could hover over the green bar on the courses page on a learning plan and it would tell you the information in the comments field on the RPL. This was useful because it was the actual date of completion. The reports give the system date of entering - not good. Now, however, all we get is "Complete via RPL". I can't find the Course completion progress report on our system. Could it be operating under an assumed name? Anyway, I have attached a screen shot for you. Thanks for your help.

RPL Screen shot.doc

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Hi Suzanne

Thanks for clarifying the report you are meaning (the Learning Plan) - I looked at the Learning Plan in a standard Totaar v1.1 and the progress bar when hovered over only displayed completed via RPL for me.

In 2.4 you can see the RPL comments by clicking on the ad RPL ison in right hand column of the Learning Plan report. The separate comments column displays when hovered over in the report.

The report I was referring to is the course completion report - this may not be visible if you don't have completion tracking turned on in the course.

Craig

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Wow, thank you everyone for your feedback! It's strange because as far as I know no-one has mentioned this issue before now, but it is clear that it is affecting a lot of people. We will definitely see what we can do to help, but there are some technical issues to work through.

The first thing we can probably do quite easily is to change face-to-face activity completion to use the session date for activity completion. This would fix the dates in the "Activity completion" report (Accessible via Reports > Activity Completion within the course).

The course completion report is a bit trickier though, because completion can be dependent on any number of user selected criteria. The naive approach would be to just use the f2f session time instead of the current time if any of the criteria are a face-to-face activities. That would work for the simplest case (completion configured to depend only on a single f2f activity), but there are cases where it would cause problems. For example:

Completion criteria requires completion of a f2f AND a quiz. The user completes the f2f first, then a week later the quiz. The completion date would be set to the date of the f2f which would be wrong in this case.
Completion criteria requiring completion of TWO separate f2f activities within a course. The system would need to know which date to use.

You can see we need a rule (preferably a fairly simple one) that we can apply consistently to get the behaviour we want in all cases.

One approach would be to look at the completion dates of all of the individual criteria, and select the latest one when setting the course completion date (if criteria are aggregated using ALL). If criteria are aggregated using ANY then it would use the date for the first criteria to be completed.

I believe that would give us the behaviour we want (in conjunction with the change to activity completion described above) but it is a fairly significant change to the core Moodle code that Totara is based on. We may need to make this change use an optional setting to enable it to maintain the existing behaviour for people who rely on the current behaviour. I will also need some time to discuss the idea with the Moodle course completion maintainer and see if it would have any unexpected implications.

I'd appreciate any feedback on whether that sounds like that would be suitable or not, or any suggestions of alternative ways for the logic to work.

On the subject of historic uploads, there will be a feature in 2.5 which will allow you to provide a file containing users, courses, completion statuses and dates which might help resolve some of the issues that have been mentioned.

Simon

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Thanks Simon.

I think the key thing here is not so much the face-to-face but how the system manages historical records (anything completed prior to today regardless of the offline learning activity). Compliance training requires exact completion dates for auditing purposes. There is also requirements for these courses to have renewals (e.g. First Aid course is required every 2 years). Reoccuring Programs in Totara can re-enrol every two years based on the course completion date which works for online learning activities however not for offline (historical) activities which is based on date administered. We currently manually re-enrol these people by running reports and enrolling people who are up for renewal.

To be more complicated, not all of our learners actually login to Totara unless they need to do online learning. So historical records are updated by trainers (this includes F2F)

Ideally what would benefit us is some way to administer an accurate completion date within the course. Perhaps a function that can be turned on or off pending on the scenario. As you have said a course could contain multiple learning activities so using the completion date of a learning activity might not work?

Also, we are currently on Totara v1 (moving to 2 early next year so there might be improvements that are coming to us with this update).

Renee

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Just to let everyone know that we've implemented most of what's been asked for here in the new 2.5 release:

We've added a new activity completion criteria to face-to-face so now you can mark f2f activities as complete based on the users attendance status (Partially Attended and/or Fully Attended). I would recommend using this instead of "by grade" which is the current method.
If you use the new activity criteria then activity completion for the f2f will use the session end date instead of the date the session was marked as attended. Note that the other activity criteria will continue to work as before to maintain backward compatibility.
Course completion criteria will now aggregate the timecompleted as discussed above so the activity completion date to set the course completion date.

As well as that 2.5 also has a historic course completions import tool to allow you to import historic completion results.

The one part we haven't got to yet is a way to update completion status/dates directly via the interface. We've got an enhancement ticket open for that and hopefully we'll get to it in due course.

Simon

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Simon can I just check one part of the expected behaviour here in 2.5? Completion is set to "any" of the activities in the course, and F2F activities use the new "Fully Attended" option. Multiple signups enabled.

Simplified scenario (i)

Course contains only two F2F activities (A and B), each with 1 session. Session A1 is 1st Jan 2012, Session B1 is 10th Jan 2012. Learner is marked at attending them both, with Session A1 marked first. Would course completion date be 1st Jan 2012 or 10th Jan 2012? Does the order in which attendance is marked, affect course completion date?

Simplified scenario (ii)

Course contains only one F2F activity (C) with 2 sessions. Session C1 is 1st Feb 2012, Session C2 is 10th Feb 2012. Learner is marked as attending them both, with session C1 marked first. Would course completion date be 1st Feb 2012 or 10th Feb 2012? Does the order in which attendance is marked, affect course completion date?

You'll see what I'm driving at: does course completion date come from the date of "the earliest-attended session", "the first-marked attendance", "the latest-marked attendance" or "the most recent-attended session" (earliest and most recent referring to session dates, first and last related to the actual time that the administrator marked attendance).

We really want the logic to be "most recent-attended session" but suspect it's "earliest-attended session" and can understand that different clients/courses would want different logic. Can you confirm, please? I also know that a course inside a certification may well behave differently.

Thanks

Tim

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Hi Tim,

In scenario (i) it would be 1st Jan 2012. In scenario (ii) it would be 1st Feb 2012. You are correct that it is the "first-marked" rather than "earliest-attended".

The difficulty with "earliest-attended" is that you would need to modify an existing completion record when the earlier (but later marked) session. That is not how completion records are designed to work and may break other systems that make that assumption. For example the audience rule "x days after completion" could miss items if they were complete on one date but that date suddenly changes.

Simon

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Hi Simon, OK thanks for the explanation. As long as we can understand the logic, we can work with it. And I do get that Totara can't please all of the people/use-cases all of the time...!

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Hello

I would agree that we need course completions to be dependant on attendance dates, otherwise as is happening at the moment our reporting function is inaccurate.

Tara Cunningham

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It is great to see that there is so much support for this feature, It would be excellent if this could be made available in some form for releazse 2.5 as we must have face 2 face in place by the end of Cctober and this has been a major blocker.

Is their any documentation on release 2.5 yet? While the roadmap document exists is does not give any detail and we want to start organising and formating our data now to get ahead. Especially if the repeat/refresh courses function is coming!

Regards,

Russell

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Hi Russell,

This is being worked on now - as soon as we have something useable (hopefully pretty shortly) Ill let you know.

regards,

George.

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Hi George,

Do you know which version(s) of Totara would be updated with this functionality?

Thanks

Tony

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Hi Tony,

This functionality will only be available in v2.5, its a significant change and we don't want to impact stable branches.

regards,

George.

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