Is this a thing?
I've never heard of anything like that. Can you give us a bit of background on what you're trying to achieve perhaps?
We did something similar in iomad (www.iomad.org) called 'licenses'. Licenses can be purchased to allow access to individual courses within a certain time frame.
Other than that, I'm struggling with this one.
What I was thinking was having a dropdown menu located within the user's profile with these options:
10
20
50
100
200
500
1,000
Then....the user could maybe purchase a course. But it wouldn't actually be a course, it would be labeled a course but used as...a license I guess? If the user has access to the course, I would then like to be able to increase his/her token count to the correct token amount. Would this not work? Then I could just hide it from being viewed as a regular class, or just outright label each class as the aforementioned token amount under a category called "Tokens."
Example:
Category: Token >
Class: 10, 20, 50, etc.
Doug, your concept is interesting, and I am not discouraging you from exploring it, it might be a creative way to teach, and I would not want to be the one to discourage creativity.
In general, this seems to be the opposite of "normal" education: students learn something and "gain" knowledge. The goal is typically to be rewarded for gaining knowledge. Students start with zero percent knowledge, and they typically work up to 100 percent knowledge. This is most often referred to as the "course grade."
So your idea makes me wonder about the advantage of starting with 100 "coins" and using them up. And I do not see the advantage of stopping a student from accessing learning activities because they have run out of "coins."
Well, just my thoughts.
Essentially, we will have two types of packages:
1) Resource / course access. Students purchase a course as they normally would, and they're granted access to the resources (books, tests, activities, etc.) for a given amount of time, such as a month, six months, a year, or indefinitely.
2) Live lessons with teachers. It's this type of package which would require tokens.
This is almost certainly going to require a custom development.
I hope (I can't work it out) that you intend to restrict access at a course level in which case we are only talking about enrolling (un-enrolling) students. If you are actually describing access to individual topics and activities then it gets very interesting.
In which case it sounds like a customised version of Scheduler.
Yeah, you might be right. I've already tweaked scheduler a little bit. This is probably going to be the best way to get the results I want.
Two plug ins that come to mind are these two blocks:
Level up: a block where users earn XP by doing things in the course (teachers can set up what the kids do) - you can have multiple levels and set up a required amount of points to earn per level. Points can be earned on a course by course basis, or all points can add cumulatively for all courses. You can’t “trade in” these points but you can restrict acces to things based on a users current level.
Stash Block: a block that houses a student’s “stash” - things they’ve earned. You can place “tokens” anywhere in a course for students to collect. They can even “trade in” objects in their stash for some other object.
Hopefully these can at least help get you close to what you’re looking to do?
Thanks, John. Those plugins definitely sound like a good starting point for what I'm trying to accomplish. Much appreciated.