There has been some discussion amongst partners of adding a system for tracking hours spent into Totara. Since this is likely of interest to subscribers I'm moving the discussion here. Below is the discussion that has taken place so far. Apologies that some of the formatting (threading) has been lost:
As discussed with Simon & others on Friday, I have a client who is interested in using Totara to track Professional Development (PD) hours.
In this client's industry (Legal), employees are expected to engage in a certain number of professional devlopment hours, and need to keep a track of what they do with these hours.
I envisage 3 initial ways in which PD hours could be input, along with an admin config to enable each method (defaulting to disabled), and one initial place the information should be output.
I expect to store the PD records in a table recording:
userid, hours, credittype, typeinstanceid, timecreated, enteredby(userid)
Credit-type would initially be COURSE, or MODULE, or EVIDENCE,
Typeinstanceid would be the id of the course, or cm, or evidence item.
If the UseCoursePD setting is enabled, and 10 hours is recorded against a course, when a user completes that course, 10 hours of PD is recorded against their userid, with credit type indicating that it was a course completion which generated the PD hours, and the id of the course in the typeinstanceid.
If the UseModulePD setting is enabled, and 1 hour is confured in a facetoface activity, when users are marked as present in a f2f session, 1 hour will be recorded against their userid, with credit type indicating that it was a coursemodule action that generated the PD hours, and the coursemoduled id will be stored in the typeinstance id. In this instance it may be relevant to record the userid of the user who recorded them as present in the enteredby column. Depending on this clients needs, I might end up customising the attendance module to take attendance at PD meetings, rather that require the admin to set up a session ahead of each meeting in a facetoface activity.
If the UseEvidencePD setting is enabled, when a user uploads "Other evidence" under record of learning, they will be given the option of claiming PD credit associated with the other evidence. Where they do this a row will be entered indicating that uploaded evidence resulted in the PD credit, and the id of the evidence will be recorded in the typeinstanceid. The user's own userid will be recorded in the entered by coulmn.
I can see potental for a number of other items generating PD records (although usually only one or two will be needed in each totara). Program completion might make more sense for generating pd for some clients. Or learning plan completion, or manual entry by manager.
For output my client needs to see pd hours against courses when viewing a user's learning plan. When one or more of the three config settings above are enabled, A value would be displayed indicating the sum of PD hours from course completion, module entries from that course, and evidence entries attached to that course in the Learning plan.
I can imagine lots of different options around displaying recorded PD hours. Our client has their employees create a new learning plan each year. These new plans would have new courses in them each year, and they will track PD that way. Others may need to see PD credits over time for a particular user, others may need to see how much PD their team have per person that is current ( current may be two years, calenday year, budget year, quarter, 365 days, etc etc.)
Having thought about this enhancement a bit, I think it will be a valuable addition, not only for lawyers, but also nurses, maybe doctors, engineers?
If this gets the offical "We're interested in this for core" stamp from the Totara team, and the client maintains interest, I'll shortly be working on a quick spec.
The key point for me is that this is a simple place to store useful information, it won't get in the way unless admin settings are enabled, and it's got a very flexible core which could be extended in lots of different ways by new inputs & new views.
Keen to hear people's thoughts.
Peterb
Peter, firstly a +1 from me. I have 2 potential legal clients, both of whom are putting off signing up for Totara until some integrated CPD tracking is in place. They don't have any development cash, I'm afraid, but could be useful for requirements gathering/testing if we need them.
Everything else is a subtlety but:
1) We've been playing with the Mahara CPD plugin. Given the approaching Totara Social platform, it might be keeping one eye on how to integrate data from that, for orgs that are using both tools?
2) Some professions tell me that they want to record more hours than are actually in the face to face course. e.g. the F2F course might be 4 hours but imply 2 hours of pre-work, 2 hours of reflection, total 8 hours. This might be where reflective logs and CPD in Mahara come in, but could it also be worth considering having a "CPD hours" field against F2F that is distinct from "duration"?
Best wishes,
Tim
Hi Peter,
I know this would be welcome for the French market where there is an obligation from employers of a certain size (49+) to provide CPD for their employees and to be able to track and report on those hours and costs.
"The Individual Right to Training (DIF) enables all employees to accumulate a "credit" of hours of training of up to 20 hours per year, with up to 120 hours cumulable over six years."
A customer has asked about this previously https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=17334#p10844
There are some old discussions on the subject of tracking CPD that I have seen at:
https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1377 and
https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1268
so I think there is a general demand/interest in the community.
Andy
Hi Andy,
The french DIF (employee initiated training entitlement) content is interesting. Certainly it's closely related, but I can't imagine a situation where all PD is DIF. There is difficulty in tracking who initiated the training.
Since this is "outside work hours", and "facilitated by the employer", I assum that the employee is not paid for the training time, but the employer pays the course costs?
Maybe this could be covered by a DIF learning plan, proposed by the employee, approved by the manager, generates enrolments in courses & either records PD with a 'DIF' flag set, or records DIF hours somewhere else altogether.
Sadly, this sounds like it's deep into 'not in this phase' territory.
I am particularly keen to know if there is anything more in the way of common business requirements that can't be met by the data I'm proposing to store - all the scenarios that I imagine "must accumulate X hours each year", or "must maintain Y hours over 3 latest calendar years" are covered. I don't _think_ there's anything I'm not thinking of...
Thanks Tim,
I'll find a Mahara person & ask what they know about the Mahara CPD plugin.
re separate CPD hours field from f2f duration: that's a fair point. I hadn't thought of re-using duration, but if I had, I hope I would have discarded that thought for the reasons you point out.
Peter
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the description and for offering this functionality for core. Based on the responses above it sounds like there's plenty of demand for this kind of thing so we're definitely interested in this for core.
If you are able to keep this forum post updated once you've got further with the specification work we can re-review the proposal as required.
What is your timeline for finishing the development?
Simon
Timeline for finishing development is _far_ from certain.
The latest I have from the client (via Kristina) is that they might want to wait on signing off on their requirements until they have met with another of our clients who is a big organisation and has been running Totara for a while. This meeting is scheduled for early August. This other client has some requirements around PD tracking too.
Anyway, I think they're looking for advice from someone who has been there/done that before proceeding.
As it stands, I see the milestones as:
- Client confirms their requirements
- we create more in the way of a spec
- and give them a quote
- they approve the quote (hopefully)
- we schedule / do the development
A lot up in the air in that little list of bulletpoints I think you'll agree.
(Edited by Thomas Wood - original submission Wednesday, 17 July 2013, 12:43 PM)
(Edited by Tom Wood - original submission Wednesday, 18 February 2015, 12:23 AM)
