Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Chris M -
Number of replies: 6

Hi,

I hope that I didn't duplicate the topic somehow - if yes, then sorry.

I'm stuck with the learning plans for the last couple of days so I decided to find some help. Until now I tried to find similar topic on the forum, I checked some of the YT videos (official and unofficial ones) and some PDFs available in the internet and what I hope is clear: I checked the documentation at the very beginning (and it looks that my case is so obvious that it doesn't need clarification, or is somehow missed). Btw. I'm using Moodle 3.9.

I tried to understand how I should use the LPs correctly. I will elaborate where I'm struggling.

I will describe my steps: 

  • I'm creating a new Learning Plan template (Site administration > Competencies > Learning plan templates) and I'm adding some competencies to this learning plan template (for this case let's assume it will be only one competency). 
  • On the "list of learning plan templates" I'm clicking a number in the column with the name of Learning Plans (to ascribe students to the LP). 
  • On the screen I see all students already ascribed to this particular LP, and by clicking the LP name for the specific student I can see his/her progress.

Until now it is clear, now the problematic part smile

On the learning plan screen for the specific student I see "status" of the LP (with "Complete this Learning Plan" in the brackets), name of the LP template (with "Unlink from LP template"), the progress, competencies and so on.

Let's assume that the student gained needed competency - the competency is marked as "competent". For me (and for the student as well), in that case, the Learning Plan is completed. Nothing is missing, but the LP is still Active. Is it so that the Learning Plan must be manually closed by the supervisor (someone with needed rights), or can be closed automatically after obtaining all needed competencies?

Nevertheless to above question: As a supervisor, I can't "complete this learning plan" as it looks that after that the LP will be set to read-only, so the competencies of other ascribed students won't be collected anymore (marked). And I can have still 20 students working with the plan.

Should I firstly unlink the LP from the template for each student and after that close it for him/her and for the next twenty or hundred students?

It is pretty inconvenient in case of roster that numbers 100 students, or 20 students with 5 ongoing learning plans - I will need to check one student after another how it looks in his/her case, unlink the LP and complete it (I know about the "request review" feature but it is competency related, and if competencies will be gained automatically, there is no easy option to get the attention of the supervisor to unlink/complete the LP for specific student). Is it possible to make it a little bit easier and I'm missing simply this functionality/rights or what is more possible - I'm not aware about it? 

Would someone be so kind to recommend me how to overcome my issue?

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In reply to Chris M

Re: Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Shirley Gregorczyk -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
Chris, IMHO the UI for the learning plans is very dated.
Learning plans assigned to student remain open until an administrator/teacher changes the status to complete. Learning plans can change, courses/competencies can be added - so the automatic closing of a student's learning plan might not always be a good thing - or a different administrative headache.

I create one learning plan for a group of student's with the same training requirements - I create different learning plans for students with different training requirements. I do not unlink competencies from a learning plan. If a student did not complete their learning plan as expected, and the competency was not completed - I close the student's learning plan with the incomplete competency, The student's learning plan is part of their historical records of the achieved competencies.

I use the plug-in Monitoring of Learning Plans it provides an excellent visual overview.
https://moodle.org/plugins/report_lpmonitointring

Kind Regards
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In reply to Shirley Gregorczyk

Re: Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Chris M -
Hi Shirley,
thanks for your comments (in both threads; I will answer there as well in a minute).

I understand (in overall) your idea with creating learning plans and closing them with or without achieved competencies.
I'm not sure whether I understand the part about unlinking the competences from the learning plan (but it is more than certain that my initial problem description was badly/not precisely enough written - sorry, English is not my first language, but I'm trying to do my best). But the competencies are not the problem here (at least not in this thread) smile
I didn't mean to unlink competences from the LP. I thought about unlinking specific LP from the LP template.
I marked the link with red ellipse below.

Unlink from LP template

Nevertheless your clarification led me to the solution and I think my problem was connected with my understanding of a pop-up message after pressing "Complete this learning plan" (above my red ellipse). The text is:
complete_lp

which is not particularly true (in correlation to the expected results).
From my perspective the statement above is saying that all competencies of users (plural) will be recorded, and not all competencies of one specific user. My issue was that I wanted to ascribe 10 students to the LP and after that check one after another and close the ones that present that my students concluded already the learning process. 
After some testing it looks like I needed: after closing one LP of the specific student (let's say Student A) I can have still two open LP of other students (Student B and Student C) who can work on the skills in their own pace.
Or am I missing something and I will get anew problem in a minute or in a month?

Thanks for the hint about the plug-in as well. I will give it a shot!
cheers!
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In reply to Chris M

Re: Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Shirley Gregorczyk -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
The Confirm message is a little off. Learning plan templates are related to an individual, student as a Learning Plan.

When an administrator/instructor "completed" the learning plan, is it closed - no further competencies can be added automatically if the formally related Learning Plan template was updated with a new competency.

You can complete (close) each student's learning plan without effecting the other active learning plans.

My use case is a little different - I offer close one Learning Plan and then place a student in a new Learning Plan - they moved on to the next phase. In concept, Learning Plans should match the student's curriculum for a given period of time. A semester, a year whatever you deem reasonable. It gets messy if you have student's joining an in-progress plan and some activities were face-to-face (Instructor-led/Zoom/Web-ex). The "new" students will never be able to achieve 100% complete status.
Kind Regards
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In reply to Shirley Gregorczyk

Re: Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Chris M -
Thanks for sharing your experience with me.
Indeed we will have a list of face-to-face courses that will bring needed skills and competencies to the students. After your comment I understood that it is not possible to complete the "course by others" and in the same time (without additional clicking) giving needed (ascribed to the course) competencies. I need to find out the solution for such case. I'm not sure why but it looks that the setting on the course competencies did not work in my case as I thought (or maybe it is a cron issue or my impatience). I think about this setting:

course competencies completion

The needed steps for my whole case will be (if I see it correctly):

  1. (precondition) students are ascribed to the course
  2. teacher creates a group of students (mostly because of the need of having a track who from the whole list participated and who missed the MS Teams call), e.g. with date as a name of the group
  3. teacher completes the course for the students (via Self Completion block; the course should have "Condition: Manual completion by others" turned "on" and the teacher should be selected as the role with such rights),
  4. teacher marks students who participated as competent ones OR (if it start to work) for each specific competency on course level it is set "Upon course completion: Complete the Competency" (like on the screen above, but as mentioned twice already it is nor working in my case, sadly).

Needless to say, I'm coming nearer the expected solution and that it promising. And somehow frustrating as well (because of some issues discussed here with you) but nobody promised it will be an easy and straightforward task.

Shirley, would you be so kind to comment about this "Upon Course Completion: Complete the competency" thing? Have you used this feature in your setup with a success? 

kind regards!

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In reply to Chris M

Re: Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Shirley Gregorczyk -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers
I use the Complete the competency condition for 99.9% of my competencies for all courses. Only a .01% do I manually grant the competency.
The sequence of events if very specific.
Create the competency
Add competency to the Learning Plan Template.
Add students to the learning plan template.
Add competency to the course and course activity.
Enroll students into the course (whatever enrolment method you use)
Students complete the course activities and are awarded the competency.
The competency is displayed as Competency on their learning plan.

Competencies cannot be awarded for previous course activity completion - automatically. If the steps are done out-of sequence, you will need to manually award the competency to each student that completed the course before the setup steps were in place.

Look at the Cron job and see how often it is running.

For face-to-face training - I use the Face-to-Face plugin (Course set-up is a little time consuming) but when I grade a student as Attended, they are awarded the competency for that course.

Kind Regards,
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In reply to Shirley Gregorczyk

Re: Concluding Learning Plans of the students (complete and unlink or other way round)

by Chris M -
Thank you Shirley for your comment about your setup and for suggestion about Face-to-face plugin. I missed this plugin totally during the research of all possible/valuable plugins for my particular case.
I give it a try!

Take care!
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