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Competency Based Education:Draft User Docs

From MoodleDocs

Competency Based Education

Available in Moodle 3.1 is a framework for evaluating students against competencies in Moodle. There are many separate parts for this feature, and this is a short walk through of the features explaining how to perform each function and what is it's purpose.

Setting up a competency framework

The first thing we need to do to use competencies in Moodle is create a competency framework and define the competencies that belong to it. This can be performed by site administrators or users with the XXX capability at the site level, or users with the XXX capability at a category level (for category specific frameworks).

To get to the competency frameworks page, open the site administration block and click on the "Competency frameworks" link.

(screenshot of the manage frameworks page)

From here we can see all the available frameworks for the site, and edit them or create new ones.

To create a new framework click the "Add new competency framework" button.

The fields for a new competency framework are:

  • Name
  • Description
  • ID number - this is required and should be very specific, especially if it is likely that you will have multiple versions of a competency framework on the site at the same time (e.g. when revising framework each year).
  • Scale - this is the default scale used when rating a competency. An individual competency in a framework can have a different scale to the framework.
  • Scale configuration - the competency framework needs to know some extra information about the scale for ratings. There should be a default value, which is assigned when the competency is completed by an automated rule - and the list of values that are deemed "proficient" need to be listed so that the student can see at a glance, which competencies have been achieved and which have not.
  • Visible - this is useful for hiding a competency from teachers while it is still being created
  • Taxonomies - this allows you to define the words used to describe competencies in the framework, depending on their depth in the tree.

Once you have created a competency framework, it will appear in the list of frameworks and you can add competencies to it.

Note - manually creating a competency framework may be time-consuming and error prone. If your framework is defined in a machine readable format, there may be a plugin in the Moodle plugins database that can import it for you.

To add competencies to a framework, click on the framework name to go to the manage competencies page for this framework.

(screen shot of the manage competencies page)

This page lets you build the tree of competencies that defines your competency framework. To start adding competencies, first click on a node in the tree (the top most node in the tree will be the framework itself) - then click on the "Add competency" button.

To create a competency, the fields required are:

  • Name
  • Description
  • ID number - this is required and must be unique within this competency framework. It is used to map competencies in backup and restore, as well as when migrating to a newer version of a competency framework.
  • Scale - the scale and scale configuration will default to the scale configured for the competency framework, but can be changed for an individual competency if required.

From the manage competencies page, there are other things that can be configured. Competencies can be marked as "related" to other competencies - and automatic completion rules can be created. This allows (for example) a competency to be automatically completed, when all of it's sub-competencies are complete.

Once you have a framework, the next thing you will need to create is a learning plan template.

To create a learning plan template - go to the "Learning plans" node in the Site administration navigation tree.

(screen shot of the learning plan templates page)

The learning plan templates page is where you define a group of competencies that should be assigned to a group of users. This is more efficient than creating individual learning plans for many separate students - and later changes to the learning plan template will be reflected in the learning plans of all the students. You can create a learning plan template by clicking on the "Add new learning plan template" button. Once you have created a template, you can add competencies to it by clicking on it's name, to go to the manage competencies page for the learning plan template. This page lets you add and remove competencies from a template - and will also show which competencies are not assigned to any courses.

Once you have added competencies to the template, you can assign it to individual students, or an entire cohort of students.