Moodle in English: Setting up an accumulated points system

Setting up an accumulated points system

by Alexander Benesch - Wednesday, May 3, 2017, 1:05 AM

Hi,

I am currently reviewing moodle with the intent of adopting it as a learning platform for a special needs school.

I have run into a challenge, which I cannot quite figure out.

The scenario is the following:

My students should have points for say: a completed task. Each point should correspond to an hours effort or so. Meaning: A course or topic, that is scheduled one hour should cash in 1 point for successful completion.

What I thus want to do, is that the students gradebook somehow reflects the accumulated points for ALL courses and course categories.

So, say I have a course category, e.g. English

Under this category there are thus several courses, e.g. writing skills, grammar or reading skills.

Each of the courses gradebooks are set up with grade items, so grammar would have a grade item called "nouns" or "synonyms", each of the giving a specified number of points.

But I want in the end to aggregate the grand total for everything, so the gradebook shows like:

English - grammar = 6 points to date

Natural sciences - climate change = 10 points to date

Total = 16 points

Or even for each course category, so English = 6 points, Natural sciences 10 points, etc.

The reason for this setup is, that I want to track the students productivity, and not only the skills.

But I simply cannot find out, how to set this up.

I have attached a picture from an old, windows-based learning system we used, which is technologically obsolete now, and which I would like to replace with Moodle.

Re: Setting up an accumulated points system

by Joost Elshoff - Tuesday, May 9, 2017, 9:16 PM

Hi Alexander,

Does the Level up block work for this case? https://moodle.org/plugins/block_xp

Re: Setting up an accumulated points system

by Melanie Scott - Wednesday, May 10, 2017, 8:54 PM

So...the gradebook is a course only thing...that said, you can probably do what you want...version may be relevant but I'm still on 2.8, so not sure.

I also track training by hours and use a custom field in my courses (I think there is a patch or something...not a tech, not sure it works past 2.9?) that I just provide all the possible credit (and can add more) and the instructor selects from a drop down.

For the reporting you are looking for, I use a plugin called Configurable Reports. It does require SQL knowledge for what you're asking...I have a report that each user can run, see only their credit, course name, activities complete vs required (for some reason it doesn't consider the questionnaire activity an activity for this purpose), course complete/incomplete, date of completion/credit award, hours earned. Mine sorts alphabetical by course title, would be easy to add the category the course is in and have it sort by category. Totals are probably harder (I'm not a wiz at SQL) but probably possible.

Mine doesn't do totals, even for the whole thing, because some of my users are enrolled in courses more than one way (they are in a cohort but self-enrolled before the cohort was enrolled, etc) and the report considers that two enrollments and doubles credit...I'm sure there is a way to fix it but (not a SQL wiz) haven't figured out how (yet). That said, someone with skills could probably do it.

I also use menus for navigation and there is one that provides access to run the 'transcript'. Or...it could be a block or something.

Teaching with Moodle

Setting up an accumulated points system