Best practice forum (Archived)

Course Completion Enhancements

We are considering the possibility of a number of enhancements to the "upload completion records" feature in Totara. If Totara devs can speak to any of these their input would be much appreciated. One question I might have is, which if any of these are already on the radar for Totara, and if they aren't on the radar then input on correct execution of a new customization would also be nice.

All critiques and feedback are welcome :)

CLI Batch Import

In many circumstances, it is necessary to import hundreds of thousands of course completion records. An ability to perform large batch imports from the command line is needed to avoid server timeouts and to enhance the automation capabilities of the course completion import. I commented in a somewhat related topic concerning scaling the import utility:

"Uploading Course completion"
https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=16521

Choose User Key Field

Currently each row in the CSV file is keyed to a user in Totara based on the username field. We need a configurable option to choose which field can be used to map records to users in the LMS. The obvious ones are: idnumber, username, email

Choose Course Key Field

Currently, each row in the CSV file is keyed to a course in Totara based on: course name, course shortname, course idnumber, or some combination of those three. At this time I am not aware of the logic being used, it would be easy to find out but I just haven't done it yet. I would assume that the import attempts to match rows from the import file to courses in Totara solely based on idnumber. Perhaps an option in the import settings should exist that let you explicitly choose which to use, ie course name, shortname, course idnumber.

Activity Completion Import

See https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17856 for some discussion on this.

The essential question is, what if you need some/none/all of the activities in a course to receive a completion record along with the course completion record? This might be necessary when you are using activity access restrictions within a course. An option in the import settings to "mark all activities as complete" might be nice.

Alternatively, we are considering customization to activity access restrictions. These options aren't changing the completion import process so much as they are affected by imported completion records.

Restrict access to this activity if course is complete via RPL record import
Ignore access restrictions to this activity if course is complete via RPL record import

From the other thread I referenced, I said:

I have considered that perhaps some new options within activity access restrictions might be nice. For instance, "ignore activity access restrictions if user has completed this course."

In other cases, learners with imported completion records should not be able to interact with an activity. For example, the requirement is that learners with imported completion records should not be able to sign up for an ILT session or submit feedback in a feedback activity. In this case, perhaps an activity access restriction option for "restrict access if user has completed this course."

I would really appreciate thoughts and concerns about this approach of adding these new activity access restrictions.

Set Scorm Lesson Status

The Scorm object being used contains logic based on the scorm lesson status. An assessment is conditionally given to the learner within the scorm object if the lesson status is not complete. We may end up needing an option to have the course completion import set Scorm lesson status on any Scorm activities contained within the course, so that learners with imported completions do not receive the assessment within the scorm activity. In other words, the logic in the scorm object will be able to correctly determine that the user already completed the course.

Custom Completion Fields (and report)

We need ability to have custom completion fields, much like custom fields in user profiles, custom course fields, custom type fields in hierarchies, custom type fields in competencies, etc. Many organizations want to import the "source" of the imported completion record. There are quite a number of other metadata that people may want to import for learners' completion records, such as a URL, the trainer, etc.

I envision this working just like other custom fields are implemented throughout Totara, via a set of database tables like mdl_completion_info_field and mdl_completion_info_data and ability to define "types" that contain these custom fields.

Custom fields would need to be importable, perhaps like the way Totara sync does it with customfield_SHORTNAME.

Also, Totara Completions report source would need to be extended in order to have the ability to filter and report on custom fields.

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Hi Jamie,

Thanks for posting this. At the moment we are working on any of the things that you suggested, but most (if not all) of them would be welcome additions to core.

The best way forward from here would be to follow the guidelines outlined in the attached document. If you are able to provide details of what you have in mind we'd be happy to review your planned approach and review code as things progress.

Simon

Totara Partners Guide to Contributing Code v1-0.pdf

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Thanks a bunch Simon.

If anyone else happens to have feedback and comments on the things I listed it is appreciated.

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Hi - I stumbled across this discussion while searching for a Course Completion Upload related query (potentially, suggestion) I have.

I am using version 2.6 and have some course completion data I wish to upload. After successfully testing the feature in our development environment, I noticed the completion status in reports defaults to 'complete via rpl'. The data I plan to upload isn't RPL related, it's a list of staff who have completed some eLearning external to our organisation and we wish to capture who has completed it and the date it was completed. I feel the status 'complete via rpl' may confuse our users and managers and would ideally like to just record 'Complete' as the status. Recording the correct completion date is extremely important and is why I'm hoping to go down the path of the Course Completion Upload, versus the manual course completion method.

If I've missed something and you are able to upload the Completion Status, I would love to know how. If not, I hope this post can make its way to the list of suggestions.

Thanks

Michelle

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Hi Michelle,

There has been a fair amount of discussion here about RPL and what its for - we feel that in most cases its necessary for compliance - that is the course hasnt actually been taken and completed as such - is that what is going on here?

regards,

George.

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Thanks George.

The course has been taken by staff and has been completed by staff but not within Totara. The example I've given is online training provided by an external organisation hosted within their environment.

This will actually be a fairly typical scenario across our organisation where a staff member attends face-to-face training or completes eLearning provided by an external organisation. In some cases staff will initiate the training via our instance of Totara and other times they will go directly to the external provider. Regardless of the method used, in most cases the training attended is for compliance and therefore the completion and competencies achieved need to be captured for reporting. A selection of course completions may be used as RPL for future internal or external training they wish to undertake, but in many cases it won’t be RPL and therefore just need to be captured as 'complete’ with the correct date of completion.

The idea was to:

Create a new course with a course ID and no topic sections
Add a title and summary to the course page (no activities required as course completed externally)
Align competencies

Throughout the year, when staff complete the 'external' training:

Use the course completion upload to capture the staff member and the date they completed the course.

Evidence that the course has been completed by staff is normally via the external provider. This is via a report they provide us, or the learner receives a certificate that they show their manager or submit to L&D.

I think the course completion upload is great and saves so much time when you only need to capture overall course completion. Unfortunately the alternative, manually recording completion, doesn't allow you to select the actual date the course was complete. If it did allow you to do this, then I would stick to this process.

Capturing CPD is another requirement, but I'll leave that alone for another day or different discussion.

I hope the above provides you with more information about what we're trying to achieve.

Thanks, Michelle

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Hi Michelle,

This is quite a complex issue so I think it will help to give you a bit of background on the history of RPL in Totara, the current state of play and what we are planning.

RPL (which stands for "Record of Prior Learning") was included in Totara as it came from some early client work on Moodle.

The idea behind it was that if a user was marked as "Complete via RPL" then they did not need to complete that course, because they had some previous training that made the course unnecessary. The reason "Complete via RPL" is a different status to "Complete" was because it represented something different: "the user doesn't need to do this course" rather than "the user has already done this course".

While that was the original rationale behind the feature, that purpose wasn't well communicated and since there was no other way to manually mark an item as complete lots of people started using it as a way to "manually" mark completion. This then leads to two specific problems.

The first was the compliance reporting problems you mention (because of the different status).

The second was that when completion is "unlocked" we normally delete all existing completion records because the criteria has changed and needs to be recalculated. In that situation it didn't make sense to also remove RPL records (since they were given for something outside of the criteria) so they aren't deleted, whereas some people expected that they would be.

In 2.6 two additional features have been added that have made the situation even more confusing, certifications and the historic course completion import tool.

Certifications caused an issue because they can lead to course completion records being reset. According to the definition above (RPL means the user doesn't need to do this course) you could argue that we should NOT reset RPL records when recertification occurred. However we eventually decided that RPL should be reset along with normal completion (which is inconsistent with the unlocking behaviour described above).

The biggest problem that has emerged is, as you mention, the historic import tool marks imported records as completed via RPL. Following the strict definition of RPL from earlier this is a bug (which slipped through because the original intent of RPL was unclear). While we could change the import tool behaviour the code is now out there and there will be organisation with RPL records which may be quite difficult to update to ordinary records (we may not be able to tell them apart from other RPL records).

That's the history, in terms of a solution I think 3 things need to happen:

1. Provide an alternative way to create and edit course completion records manually. This is clearly something people want to do so we should allow it. We have an open feature request for this and it has been prioritised for the next release (2.7). Hopefully we will have time to get it done (unfortunately we can't promise that at this stage).

2. Add a 'type' field to course completion records to allow us to distinguish between completion records from different sources:

Normal records created by meeting criteria in the course
Historic records imported via the import tool
Manually created records generated using the feature from 1.
RPL records?

This will allow us to provide configuration options to let users decide which types of records should be deleted when completion is unlocked or a certification is reset.

3. Decide how RPL records should be different from ordinary records (if at all). One option here is to remove the concept of RPL completely (make them the same as manual records). Another is to keep them as a separate type with their current behaviour. The answer here depends a lot on how existing sites are currently using RPL and how they would like it to work. So any feedback from anyone on that is appreciated.

Sorry for the long post - hopefully this clarifies a few things in what is a complex and confusing area of Totara at present!

Simon

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Thanks so much Simon for explaining the background and proposed solutions.

It’s good to see that our intended use of RPL in Totara matches the idea behind it. As you have gathered from my previous post, the next layer beyond this is to be able to capture completion of external courses that form part of our employee’s development plan. If an employee comes to our organization with the required skills and knowledge, then the employee will be granted RPL for the necessary courses. If it’s an existing employee with no RPL, they complete the external course or courses and we capture the end result – ‘Complete’, Score (if relevant), date.

Regarding your solutions, I completely agree with solution 1 and 2. Regarding solution 3 RPL definitely has its place and should be kept, it should also have a different status than 'Completed'. A bit more flexibility would be great, perhaps a ‘type’ field as you mentioned, so that you have control over whether it’s RPL or just completion, together with the ability to set the actual completion date (when not using the historic records import tool).

I’m no programmer or technical expert so what I'm about to say will more than likely be easier said than done - here goes anyway. Regarding point 2, specifically the 2^nd bullet point (historic records imported by the import tool), if you had the ability to add the field ‘Completion Status’ (or equivalent) to the CSV file and set the values to what you need them to be, i.e. ‘Complete’ or ‘Complete via RPL’ that would provide the flexibility I believe this tool needs going forward. Regarding organisations that already have records captured as ‘RPL’ but should be normal, we will be part of this exact scenario if/when I upload a couple of hundred records I have sitting here ready to go. It’s a catch-22 – I need to upload the data, but the 'Completed by RPL' status is going to be incorrect.

Thanks again Simon. Hoping others out there have some feedback to share.

Michelle

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Hi Simon,

Is it on the roadmap to allow you to delete the course completion records that have been uploaded through the course completion upload? (either RPL or other evidence). It happened to a client recently and its happened to me before;

See >> https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=18154

Thanks

Pete

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Hi, Pete

Just to let you know, we added the capability to delete evidence items created through course completion upload in 2.5.14 and 2.6.3. See T-12494 in the release notes.

Cheers

Tom

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El contenido de esta publicación del foro se ha eliminado y ya no se puede acceder a él.

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Hi Tom,

I can't see a response to Billy's query above - is the ability the edit/remove evidence available centrally? It would be really helpful if it was?

Sorry if I'm re-asking a question you've already responded to somewhere else.

Many thanks
Steph

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+1 again!

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El contenido de esta publicación del foro se ha eliminado y ya no se puede acceder a él.

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Hi, Billy

The feature / enhancement request (tracked under enhancement ID 11568) you are referring to has been deemed high priority and is under consideration for development by Totara core.

The "Suggest features" forum post for this can be found here.

This does not indicate a delivery commitment. Development of the functionality is subject to further prioritisation and resource availability.

Development priorities are reviewed regularly. If you wish to escalate your market need for this functionality, please contact your Totara Channel Partner Manager.

Thanks.

Tom

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Hi Simon

You asked for feedback on different scenarios.

For us its less important that a course is completed "via RPL" or not. From a user perspective we just want to know that the user has completed the course and that reports are consistent.

In other words, in the reports there should be no difference between a learner completing a course on Totara and completing a course outside of Totara.

The only difference is that the evidence will be a certificate or validation number rather than a grade.

Here is my take on the 2 scenarios:

1. In BULK - Using Historic Import Tool

When importing historic data in bulk from other systems or third parties the important information we need to capture

a) name of the course

b) date when completed

c) date started

d) Grade

e) award / validation code

f) Awarding body

2. Self Service - User manually completes

We would like to create programs and certifcations which may include courses that are not taken via totara for some of the reasons explained earlier. Typically it will be an accredited course that can only be provided by a 3rd party.

We would like to create a user journey that allows the learner to mark as complete themselves when they have completed the external course by uploading a certifcate as evidence so they can then unlock the next course in the sequence without waiting for an andministrator

This will allow us to create more meaningful certifications that include courses that have to be taken outside of Totata and allow learners to take ownership

I hope this helps

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Hi Jamie,

For us the #1 priority would be when we use csv file to upload course "completion records" (via rpl), it would be awesome if we can mark the program as completed as well. For example, if we have a training program that consist of two "courses," if those two courses are marked as "completed" for certain users by csv file upload, that user will also be marked as "completed" at the program level as well (and the My Report will show those users are completed the program).

Since most of our training are "program" based due to reporting needs, this is VERY important for us. Thanks!

By the way, if this is not possible right now, is there a work-around that we can achieve this? Thanks again!

Wen

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Hi Wen. The behavior you are talking about should actually already work. The caveat is that the program completion isn't triggered immediately, it is calculated as a result of the daily program completion cron job (default is that it executes once every 24 hrs).

If that isn't happening (after waiting 24 hrs), I would bet that your program cron jobs may be exiting abnormally before the program completion runs.

Jamie

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