Competencies and their associated learning plans exist outside of the course environment. This is because in many cases, learners need to meet criteria in more than one course to achieve a competency and they must meet competencies in a number of courses to complete a learning plan. You might, for example, be a nursing student. Your learning plan includes competencies related to several courses covering practical experience in hospital, anatomical knowledge and drug use and prescription. These courses might well be taught by different tutors who can all see the competencies in their own course, but do not have a general overview of students’ progress in their learning plan.
Some organisations will have a dedicated supervisor or mentor who will check the learning plans, review any competencies and uploaded evidence. A manager can do this by default in Moodle for all students on the site - but that could mean a lot of learning plans! What if you want to allow a member of staff to monitor specific students’ learning plans and competency achievement? Someone who will only have access to a particular group of learners? Perhaps even one of their course teachers?
The solution to this is to create a new custom role and assign it to the chosen member of staff. The students they will take care of are added to a cohort and the member of staff is then assigned to this cohort in the ‘user’ context. This simply means that they are restricted to monitoring only the students under their care. (It works in a similar way to the Parent role where parents or mentors are connected only to their own children or mentees.)
There are a number of roles you can use or adapt to suit your own purposes, depending on what you need your colleagues to do. Here are a few example roles:
The Learning plan viewer role simply allows a staff member to view the learning plans of a selected group of students. You might for example give this to course teachers so they have a more general overview of their class beyond their own course.
The Learning plan supervisor role allows a staff member to create new learning plan templates and then assign them to their students (and no others).
The Competency reviewer role allows course teachers to review competencies and evidence sent by their students.
If your organisation uses competencies and learning plans, and you’d like to fine-tune the roles associated with them, let us know what your needs are - or even better - let us know how you’ve set things up in your organisation and we can all contribute to improving the documentation