I've been asked to look into the situation with Outcomes again, both for faculty professional development and for student reporting and program accreditation. How is the Outcomes 2 development progressing? Now that Badges are in 2.5, hopefully there has been more thought about integrating Outcomes with Badges.
Based on what has been written so far, I look forward to support for many-to-many relationships between Activities and Outcomes, though I'm still a little worried about how this will work for Activities that don't currently support Advanced Grading options.
Here are some other thoughts:
1 - Could there be a way to automatically display the Outcomes (or summary Outcome Sets) addressed by all Activities within a Course Section? If not, could we at least have the option to display the Outcome within the course section under each Activity?
2 - Suppose we have a list of Outcomes and a list of Activities, and we have not specifically defined the relationship between them, and we'd like individual students to suggest this relationship. For example, suppose I have an Outcome of "consistently uses correct writing mechanics such as spelling, capitalization, and punctuation." The course has a dozen essay assignments. How about letting students identify up to three (or another defined number) of Activities that they feel meet the Outcome? Granted a more sophisticated way of solving this would be by using an e-portfolio system with integrated assignments, but that would probably also be more difficult for students to use.
3 - Bulk course create and remove tools are now in core as of Moodle 2.6 (MDL-13114). Will the identity of an Outcome Set for each course in the csv be supported when Outcomes 2 is integrated into Core? Or will we need to rely on making a copy of some canonical template course that has the Outcomes defined?
4 - The current Outcomes Import system is very difficult to use. Although the documentation says it wants a "comma separated values" file, in fact the separator must be a semicolon, and a single non-ascii character will halt processing of the file. There is no way to manipulate Outcomes in bulk once they are created (e.g. modifying the Scale defined). There is no report that I can find that displays the Description of the Outcome, making me wonder why the field is even present. I hope the new system will be easier to use.
5 - It seems that Advanced Forums will not be replacing Forums in Moodle Core any time soon. Hopefully there will be revisions to Moodle Core Forums that will provide better grading features. MDL-1626