Outcomes comparison

Moodle HQ recently completed an overview of several outcome solutions that are either proposed or currently being used with Moodle. This is to inform the future development of outcomes in Moodle core.

This document will refer to outcomes throughout rather than using the various different terminology. For example, competencies, learning objectives.

Potential Implementations

Three implementations have been examined.

MDL-40230

This implementation was intially planned to go into Moodle 2.7 but was not ready in time.

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-40230

https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Outcomes_Specification

Totara

Refers to outcomes as competencies although this document will use the word outcome.

Two user heirarchies - Support for position and organization heirarchies is provided. For example, the organization hierarchy could be used to represent the various regional offices of an organization while the position heirarchy could be used to represent jobs such as regional sales manager, sales person etc.

Outcomes support in the heirarchies - Outcomes can be attached to position or organization elements. For example, all sales people (a position) may have a particular set of outcomes or all users assigned to a particular regional office (an organization) may be given outcomes.

Outcomes can be arranged into a heirarchy - Parent outcomes can require all or any of their child outcomes be completed.

Outcomes can be associated with courses.

Supports "objectives", tasks to be completed other than outcomes and possibly outside of Moodle entirely.

Admin creates template Learning plans that can consist of courses, outcomes, objectives and programs (a series of courses). Users can then create a learning plan that pulls in courses and outcomes automatically.

Reports including many site admin pages are configurable. Columns can be added and removed and reordered.

Elis

Flexible heirarchy - User sets can be used to create any number of heirarchies. You can recreate position and organization heirarchies but its less obvious how you would do that versus the explicitly named heirarchies in Totara.