Rewards Tally block

The Rewards Tally plugin provides a block to display the achievement points, or reward points, accumulated by the user and the user communities associated with the school or institution. 'User communities' could mean year groups, 'houses' or any other logical grouping used at the school.

Background

Schools typically operate some sort of rewards procedure where students accumulate reward points for various aspects of their school life, such as good behaviour, good work or other positive behaviours. Often, these rewards points are stored in school Management Information Systems (MIS) or on some other external IT system rather than stored directly in Moodle. In this scenario, it can be difficult to display either a student's or the whole school's rewards data in Moodle. One option might be to use a simple HTML block to point to an HTML page rendered by an external server that shows a running tally of rewards points, but this is crude and it would be difficult to show an individual user's rewards point total since it would not be easy to associate their user ID or name with the page request.

How this block helps

This block provides a consistent framework for presenting user reward tallies. Assuming this data is stored on an external IT system, a sample PHP script is provided (rewardsrpc.php) that can be configured to match a local institution's use case with PHP functions for the user and community points totals. The Moodle block initiates a remote procedure call on the external system, and receives the data back via JSON. This is then processed internally and presented to the user front-end block. It is fully customisable via the admin settings (site administration) pages. Examples of customisations include:

• whether or not to show an individual user points tally [Moodle site-wide setting]
  
• the names of 'communities' and any associated colour codes [Set in the remote script that supplies the data]
• whether to sort communities' point scores to create a 'leader board' [Moodle site-wide setting]
  

• Install the block in Moodle by downloading the .ZIP and using Moodle's plugin interface to install it in the standard way. The default settings should be fine for most use cases.
• Find the file 'rewardsrpc.php' which should be within the web root of Moodle at ..../blocks/rewardstally/rewardsrpc.php' . This file should either be edited in-situ or moved to some other web server. Use the comments and guidance notes inside this file to input the logic (which may be database calls etc) in order to extract the rewards data from your existing IT systems.
• Use the Moodle admin console Site administration -> Plugins -> Rewards Tally to ensure the settings are correct. The 'User ID Field', 'Rewards API URL' and 'Rewards API Secret' will probably need to be set. Be sure to generate your own API Secret as an SHA-256 string, eg using a web-based generation site and ensure it is updated in rewardsrpc.php
• n.b. rewardsrpc.php can be renamed as long as its new name is updated in the 'Rewards API URL' setting. It need not be a PHP script either.