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

Outcome sets are added/imported at the system level. They can be imported in a range of formats.

Outcomes can have a subject or education level specified.

Outcome sets are mapped to courses. When mapping them subjects and education levels can be selected from those recorded against the outcomes.

Totara

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

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. Generally speaking, there are numerous places to attach outcomes giving great flexibility.

Outcomes can NOT be attached to individual activities, quiz questions or rubric items.

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, removed and reordered.

Elis

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

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.

Programs can be created consisting of multiple courses. Prerequisities and co-requisites can be set. Courses contribute credits towards the programs required credits.

Each program contains a set of course descriptions. Course descriptions can be linked to a template Moodle course that contains activities etc. Course descriptions contain other data like links to outcomes and data used to create PDF certificates.

Outcomes are created within the course description by picking activities or grade items (including grade categories) from the course description template course. They do not appear to exist outside of a specific course description. They cannot be imported.

When creating outcomes a completion grade is set. When the associated activity/grade item surpasses that completion grade the outcome is marked as complete.

Outcomes can be attached to an individual activity but can NOT be attached to quiz questions or rubric items.

A track is an instance of a program. It contains course instances which are automatically created from the course descriptions. The course instance is NOT a moodle course but is linked to a Moodle course that is created from the course description template course.

Users can be enroled into a track based on their membership in a user set. They will then proceed through the course instances based on the prerequisite relationships set up.

Using the "results engine" users can be moved between programs based on their results. User profile custom fields can also be altered.