Hi everyone - long time lurker, first time poster here
So I was asked to check if there is any possibility for us to automatically remind our employees to come back to a course and complete it, if they haven't completed their course in xy days/weeks and so on. By "automatically" i mean "Without the need of a teacher or an admin needing to check reports or sending bulk-mails on a regular basis".
To be more precise: Some of our colleagues (teachers so to speak) would like to be able to set up reminders on a per-course-basis (so not for the whole site), where they would like the system to automatically check if there are any students in their courses, who haven't completed the specific course yet. I'm referring to the proper "course completion" date, not the "activity completion" of single activities. If there are students, who haven't completed a course yet, they should automatically be reminded via e-mail to come back to the course and complete it.
Additionaly the teachers would like to remain flexible by being able to determine the reminder periods per-course. Let's say course A should remind people who haven't finished to course within 10 days, while course B should remind perticipants in 10 weeks. Course C should remind anyone at all.
Currently, users of specific roles (admins, teachers, managers) can go into a course and have a look at some reports (like the course completion plugin), mark students manually who haven't finished the course yet and send a bulk-message to them. However, they'd be more happy if they didn't have to bother with checking the course reports, or the "insights" tool regularly.
The first thing that immediately pops up if you research course reminders is the "reengagement" plugin. While the plugin is suuuper handy, it's not exactly what I was looking for, as it's goal is rather to remind people to come back and finish certain activities (such as a quiz or an assignment e.g.) - so it checks for activities, but not for the whole course completion. Of course I could just go ahead and set up the reengagement activity for the most important activities in a course, however it's still not as comfy as looking up the course completion status up, as in this case on doesn't need to bother about deciding which activities are crucial for reminders.
I was hoping to find a plugin for that, as I don't see a native way of fully automating the reminding process. I actually found a topic with a very similar question, but it's rather old and closed, and didn't really come up with a conclusion, so I thought I'd just go ahead and ask.
I guess if there is no plugin there yet, I'd need to find someone who is going to script something for us, which we then could periodically run over cron. Or we could try to make the reengagement plugin work somehow, although I can already see our "teachers" scratching their heads of confusion once I show them how the "reengagement" activity works 😅
Infos about our environment:
- We use moodle 3.10
- We use moodle in a way that we provide tutorial videos in different courses for our employees. So there are really no assignments or anything "school-like" there. So my question might sound a little "off" to some of you
- Some of these courses need to be taken by all employees, as they teach the basics about certain software or security infos etc - that's where reminders would come in handy.
- We have hundrets of users enrolled in courses. That's why we're thinking about automating the reminder process rather than using insights or letting "teachers" check the course completion progress regularly.
Thank you very much in advance for your inputs and best regards from Austria 💗
Ilker
