Course Progress Flightpath Report

Course Progress Flightpath Report

by Steve Radford -
Number of replies: 1

I am considering commissioning someone to produce a new ‘Course Progress Flightpath’ report plugin for Moodle, which would enable teachers to review an individual student’s progress within a course over time as opposed to the 'live snapshot' views which are all that seems to be available currently.

My plan is either to sponsor or co-sponsor the project (or possibly contribute to crowdfunding the project if it turns out to be hugely expensive) with the plugin then becoming available in Moodle plugins directory for free.

At this stage I'm interested in two things:

  1. People's feedback on the attached draft specification (I'm sure there will be lots of things I haven't considered).

  2. Any thoughts on who / how to go about finding a developer to cost and complete this project.

Please note that I'm conscious this plugin might require significant resources to run on sites with many courses and many users. I've have taken this into account when designing the attached specification, but if anyone has any additional thoughts/suggestions about this area please let me know.

If you have any feedback then you can either do so in the forum thread, or by adding comments or tracked changes to the attached specification and uploading it in your reply.

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In reply to Steve Radford

Re: Course Progress Flightpath Report

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers
Steve,

Overall this looks good. I find the distinction between the activity completions per se and whether they are also in the course completion settings to be interesting. My experience tells me these are almost always set the same, but obviously don't have to be. In any case, there's likely some education to do here for  instructors.

I think the section that is missing is the specific capabilities your plugin will need. You mention "roles" several times but it is much better if you first specify which capabilities your plugin will need to have to be added to those roles (or to be available to any custom roles.) It won't work without some sort of checking and it is much better practice (and the common Moodle code practice) to check for specific capabilities and permissions instead of a standard role.

So, I think you need to specific those in some detail here so a developer will know what to check for given certain functions (eg the deleting of rows). 

This is especially so as you plan to open it up for others to use, and you have no way of knowing how sites may use or adjust roles, but with a permissions based setup, anyone will easily be able to adapt it to their specific setup.

Good luck,

Randy
Average of ratings: Useful (1)