Progress tracking
Note: This page outlines ideas for the User Competency Tracking Module. It's a specification under construction! If you have any comments or suggestions, please add them to the page comments.
Currently in Moodle 1.9 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. eg You could grade "Understands basic evacuation procedures" on a scale like "No understanding, Partial understanding, Total understanding".
What we need now is a way to
- Relate a list of desired outcomes to each USER, for the site, like a "learning plan" for that user.
- For each outcome, specify a desired competency (eg Total understanding) for that competency to be "achieved".
- Find a good way to connect Grades in gradebooks to these competencies
- We'll have to cope with results that might not contribute to final grading, such as initial evaluations.
- We'll have to cope with final grading from more than one course, and aggregate them
- In the end we'll have to generate nice reports to admins and users so that they can see what a particular user can do and what they still have to learn or prove.
- Finally, for extra credit, it would be nice to have a "suggest courses" features which would suggest upcoming courses that can help a user gain missing competencies.
Related data
- Outcomes are defined like this: Outcomes tables
- Conditional activities includes course completion Completion tables
Initial proposal
The module will track the competency of a user based on the course outcome, the desired grade and the grade that user obtained for the course. If user doesn’t achieve the desired grade for a course, then that means the user does not have that particular competency. This will be developed based on the IMS specifications namely IMS global RDCEO and IMS global LIP.
I define the competency as follows: If a learning outcome (O1) of a course (C1), specified /desired measure or scale (M1), and the user achieved scale is M2 (greater than M1) then we may say that the particular user has competency to carryout O1 in C1. For example if the outcome of a course is ‘Understands basic evaluation methods’, course is Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and the desired grade is ‘total understanding’. Then if user receives ‘total understanding’, then we can say that the user has the competency in ‘evaluation techniques in HCI’.
My effort on this User Competency Tracking Module can be divided into three parts. I will;
- model ‘possible outcomes’ and corresponding measures or scales for those outcomes.
- do a mapping between the courses and the corresponding outcomes.
- develop the module in order to track the competencies of the users using IMS Learner Information Profile (IMS LIP).
The specification IMS RDCEO (IMS Reusable Definitions of Competencies or Educational Objectives) allows us to model educational objectives. Using the IMS RDCEO specification the outcome scales also can be specified (using the additional structured statements tags). The specification is not much specific; therefore we can have even additional details as needed. We may call this as ‘outcome repository’.
Courses may have one or more outcomes and we can have that information by mapping the courses to the corresponding outcomes in the repository. Also in this mapping we can specify the desired grade, because different courses may expect different scale of grade requirement for the same outcome.
IMS LIP can be used to have a comprehensive learner profile. According to the specification, the profile has various fields including the acquired competency and the goal. The goal can be used to keep users’ expected competency or the learning plan. By using the LIP, we can also specify the acquired competency of the user and the grade he obtained. These grades can be gathered from gradebook of the Moodle.
Using the information we stored based on IMS RDCEO and IMS-LIP specification, we can also come up with the courses the user need to follow in order to satisfy learning plan. Further, based on these stored information, reports regarding course outcomes and user-competencies can be generated to various levels like administrators, users, etc.
Advantages of this approach: The recent developments in the e-Learning field are mainly based on IMS specifications, eg: SCORM. Therefore the implementation of the competency based on IMS global specifications, will give interoperability and portability. The IMS global LIP is a comprehensive profile specification. Therefore in future this can be further extended to keep more information about the users. For example, this may be used to keep the accessibility information, users’ transcripts, affiliation, etc.
Problems to solve
- Does passing a course mean all the outcomes in a course have been met? Or should we treat them independently of the course grade?
- How do we deal with the same outcome being used by more than one course?
- How do we aggregate the same outcome being used by more than one activity in a course?
