Progress tracking

Note: This page outlines ideas for the Progress tracking feature planned for Moodle 2.0. It's a specification under construction! If you have any comments or suggestions, please add them to the [comments].

Introduction

This feature will allow tracking of the progress of each student, displaying what has been achieved and what is still to be achieved.

There are two ways to do this: by course and by competency:

1. Showing progress by course is pretty obvious and can work on any Moodle site: we just list the courses that have been completed and some courses that are still to be done. The completed courses can show the final grades and the date completed. Courses which are not yet completed can be shown with dates of when they start (if courses use a 'weekly' course format) or shown with the text "not yet completed". In Moodle 2.0, the course completion feature should also allow courses to be shown as either completed or not yet complete (see Course_completion).
2. Showing progress using competencies requires the Outcomes features in Moodle 1.9 to be enabled and used across the whole site. When outcomes are enabled, we have a way of saying "these courses and these activities are intended to achieve these outcomes" and teachers can grade students against those outcomes. The progress report can then show a list of outcomes as past achievements and future goals for each user.

Definitions

An outcome is a statement with a scale.

eg "Can identify verbs in simple sentences" - Never, Sometimes, Always

A competency is a skill gained when person is deemed to have successfully achieved an outcome.

eg Jenny can identify verbs in simple sentences  "Always"

Goals

1. Allow "admins" to devise an individual learning plan for an individual user. This can be either in terms of "courses" or "competencies".
2. Allow "admins" to develop a learning plan template. This can also be either in terms of "courses" or "competencies".
3. Allow "admins" to assign a learning plan from a learning plan template to an individual a user or a group of users. This assignment can be made manually in one action (similar to role or group assignments), or automatically using methods such as external databases or parsing text files containing data.
4. Allow "admins" to adjust an individual learning plan for a user, including a portion previously assigned from a learning plan template.
5. Allow "admins" to assign a due date for completing each "course" or "competency".
6. Allow "students" to see their own individual learning plan and their current progress along it (showing what is: done; in progress; or not done).
7. Allow "admins" the ability to see different reports for this data and answer questions like "how many people fit this profile" or "what is everybody working on right now?" or "which people haven't met this competency"?

General architecture

Most of the scripts will be in a top-level subdirectory called "track". This directory will have a similar structure to the grade subdirectory, with plugin support for reports, import and export plugins.

Course-based progress tracking

1. Each user can have courses linked to them (past, current and future).
2. For each course, we look if the course is finished or not.
3. Finished courses are show as "Done", with final grade
4. Unfinished but currently-enrolled courses are shown as "In progress"
5. Other courses are shown as "Not done yet" and will be done in the future

Competency-based progress tracking

1. Each user can have outcomes linked to them , with a required level of competency (grade) for that outcome
2. For each outcome, we look at completed courses to see what grades they have
3. These are aggregated in some admin-defined way (Mean? Maximum?)
4. Outcomes with high grades are show as "Done", with final grade
5. Other outcomes in currently-enrolled courses are shown as "In progress"
6. Other outcomes are shown as "Not done yet" and will be done in the future. They can be used to suggest further courses by matching outcomes.

Requirements

• We'll need to access and use the existing site-wide Outcomes Outcomes tables

• We'll need to use the tables that indicate completion status for courses (these are not yet in place) Course Completion

• We need to get aggregate information about the course outcomes and aggregate grades for each user from the gradebook API

Standards support

Moodle should support global standards in this area to be able to import and export this sort of information.

IMS RDCEO

IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc released a specification called IMS Reusable Definition of Competency or Educational Objectives (IMS RDCEO) for describing, referencing, and exchanging definitions of competencies, primarily in the context of online and distributed learning. Mostly the specification information are unstructured text and intended for human interpretation. This specification provides means to create common understandings of competencies that appear as a part of learning plan.

IMS RDCEO specification contains following elements:

• Identifier : Globally unique label that identifies the Competency or Learning objects.

• Title : A single short mandatory human readable text for competency.

• Description : Human readable unstructured description of competency and this is an optional element.

• Definition : An optional structured description that provides more meaning to the competency.

Definition element contains following sub elements :

• • Model source : An identifier of the model or structure upon which the definition is based. It is good to have a URI as model source.

• • Statement : Description about single characteristic of a definition and a definition must contain one or more statements.

• • Statement Id : An optional string that is local identifier for the statement within the model

• • Statement Name : This is an optional sub elements used to label the statement.

• • Statement text : An optional unstructured textual description of those aspects of the competency referred to by the statement Name.

• • Statement token : An optional vocabulary token, along with an identifier of the source of the vocabulary.

• Metadata : An optional meta-data used to denote authors information, creation date etc. It is recommended that this should conform to IEEE LOM standard.

IMS LIP

(Describe standard and the minimum it needs)

Issues

1. Does completing a course mean all the outcomes in a course have been met? Or should we treat them independently of the course grade? Perhaps the admin needs to decide this as a setting.
2. How do we deal with the same outcome being used by more than one course? Should the admin specify an aggregation method for this?

See also

• GSOC/2008
• User Competency Tracking Module application abstract