Totara Learn Open Discussions

Learners retaking courses and completion date

Welcome to this forum!

I notice this topic has come up several times over the years (since 2015?) but I wanted to ask for any feedback now.

Currently, once a learner has completed an activity (scorm) and a completion date has been recorded, this is not updated if they subsequently complete the course again.

This is a problem for us, because learners often want to 'refresh' their learning (when content changes slightly or is updated), and their managers want to keep track and the records are required for audit.

Our charity deals with rights and regulation, which change often.

A Totara support person suggested Certifications were the answer to this issue, but for us they are not. We're not 'all under one roof'. Our network is 59 individual offices, with their own managers and 'audiences', but those 59 sites do not have admin rights to the LMS.

So, they can't set up certifications.

That being said, our 59 sites wants learners to redo certain modules as required (due to small changes) or as they (learners) want, not as a formal date driven plan. These changes can happen weekly, so creating or amending multiple certifications is completely impractical.

Why can't Totara simply record the latest (and all dates) that a module (scorm) is successfully completed?

Apologies for the long post and thanks.

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Hi Jane, have you had a look at the SCORM settings section?

There is an Attempts Management section with a few options that might be worth having a look at.

Sue

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Thanks for the reply Sue - I'll take a look again.

I tested and experimented with different options on that, and it didn't quite do what the network needed, but I'll check it out again.

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Hi Jane

I also posted about this recently:

https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=25558

You could try this setting and see if it works for you. I'd be interested to know what results you get. Unfortunately we could not get this to work for us consistently, despite using identical scorms.

I didn't get a response to my post as to why this is not working for us so hopefully someone will pick it up 2nd time round.

I agree, it's quite common for staff to be required to re-take courses . Certifications aren't suitable for all scenarios, particularly if they are retaken ad hoc.

Paul

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Hi Paul

Thanks for the reply - I'll be working on it over the next few weeks and will certainly post here what works and what doesn't.

I'll try that setting, so thanks again.

Jane

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Hi Jane,

Keeping the first 'course completed date' is kind of baked-in behaviour with Totara. The philosophy behind it is exactly the same as you'd have with, say, an actual real life examination paper - when you've passed then thats when you passed. You can do the paper again if you like but the fact remains you passed it when it was first presented to you.

You mention 'learners 'refresh' their learning (when content changes slightly or is updated)', this may seem trivial but if thats the case then technically its not the same course. Would it be possible for your users to save the updated courses as new courses maybe with a naming protocal which includes the date?

regards,

George

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Hi George

Jane - I hope you don't mind me chipping in here .

This is a good suggestion and one we use on some of our courses however it can create a lot of additional admin work sometimes

For example here are some of the issues we've encountered.

1. You have to archive and hide the old course and make sure it's not associated with any audience

2. If you have it associated with an audiences you have to suspend the audiences, clone it and then add the new course back in

3 if the course is associated with a programme you have to archive the programme and then recreate it.

4. If you have scheduled reports running you may need to recreate them to report on the new course.

I understand the logic in an academic setting that once you've passed a course you've passed but in a business setting training is used more as a cyclical activity so having a more flexible option to track the latest completion would be helpful.

For example a common problem we have ( I appreciate this is different to Jane's) is when a learner has to retake a course as part of a disciplinary action or appraisal and then demonstrate that they have retaken it.

Sorry for piggy backing on this post !

Paul

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we had the same issue and what we did was create a report from the site logs source and set the search to have the event class name contain "Submitted SCORM status"

The columns we included on the report were:

user name
course name
course time
context
time
description

It, as any workaround does, comes with some caveats

the SCORM has to have it's activity completion set
site logs only go back four years

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