Pulse

Activities ::: mod_pulse
Maintained by Stefan Scholz, bdecent gmbh
Automated notifications and powerful completion logic for better course workflows
Latest release:
1050 sites
377 downloads
76 fans
Current versions available: 1

Version   Moodle   Since  


Pulse is the teacher's Swiss army knife to improve student engagement and compliance in moodle courses. There are two main features: (1) notifications and (2) completion workflows.

Notifications

Each Pulse activity can be configured to send a notification once it becomes available to the student. There are a number of placeholders that can be used to personalize the message, like the first name of the student or the name of the course. The notification can be sent to the student, the teacher, the non-editing teacher or the manager. Other course context or user context roles are supported as well, e.g. parent or staff manager.

Using availability restrictions, teachers can specify in a very flexible and powerful way, when the notification is sent, e.g.:

  • upon enrolling into the course as course welcome message
  • after joining a group as group welcome message
  • at a specific date as reminder for an upcoming activity
  • after completing a specific activity as congratulations message
  • after a specific date AND only for students that have *not* completed an activity as reminder for an overdue activity
  • for students that received a very good/very bad grade in a quiz as warning message to parents
  • and many more....!

In addition to the notification sent to the student, the same — or another — text can be shown on the course page. (similar to the label module)

Completion workflows

Pulse supports activity completion in three ways (in addition to moodle core ones): upon availability, when marked complete by student and when approved by other role.

Complete when available

This activity completion criterium is very powerful when used in combination with availability restrictions. One key issue this solves is that course completion is a bit limited when it comes to activity completion — you can either require all or any; with Pulse, you can build flexible scenarios easily, for example:

  1. multilingual content where the student can choose which one to complete
  2. multiple learning paths, depending on student choice, progress or grades
  3. section completion
  4. and many more....!

Complete when marked complete by student

The key difference to core's manual completion is that it is non-reversible. Once the student has marked the activity as complete, the student cannot revoke it any more. This is important for a number of scenarios like:

  1. Gathering consent before the course can be started (e.g. for privacy reasons)
  2. Asking the student to choose a learning path
  3. Legal requirements where students need to read and confirm something, as disclaimer
  4. For offline/real life activities that shall be represented in the course in a very simple and efficient way
  5. As checklist for the student.

Complete when marked complete by others

This completion criterium can be used to either get approval by course or user context roles, for example the teacher of the course, the parent of the child or the line manager of the course. Teachers/parents/managers can give their approval in a very simple and intuitive way, much easier than any other interface moodle core provides. 

Pulse supports groups (non-editing teachers only see students in their group) and user context roles (e.g. parents can only see their children, line managers can only see their employees).


Try it out now

We've created a test site which you can use to test pulse: bdecent.io


Roadmap and feature requests

Have a look at our public roadmap to see what we're working on and what we've planned for the future: https://bdecent.de/product-category/pulse/ (scroll down a bit)

If you are missing a feature or have an idea for improvement, please let us know! You can either contact us using chat.bdecent.de or create a github issue at https://github.com/bdecentgmbh/moodle-mod_pulse/issues


We would love to get your feedback on this new feature, so if you have a bit of time, head over to our test site, create a course (any user can create courses in the playground category) there and try it out.

Try it now on our test site


No support in the comments section on this page

Please note that we don't provide any support for this plugin in the comments section on this page. We appreciate your commendation and reviews for this plugin in the comments. For bug reports and feature requests, please check the documentation first and create, if needed, a ticket in the bug tracker. If you have a question, feel free to chat with us.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Potential privacy issues

The plugin allows users with editing rights to send notifications to users using placeholders.

Screenshots

Screenshot #0
Screenshot #1
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Screenshot #3

Contributors

Stefan Scholz (Lead maintainer)
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them

Comments RSS

Show comments
  • Gerald Louw
    Tue, Sep 12, 2023, 6:04 PM
    Hi there Stefan,

    Is this Plugin compatible with Moodle 4.1.5?
  • Stefan Scholz
    Fri, Sep 15, 2023, 11:39 PM
    Hi Gerald, yes, we are not aware of any issues.
  • Rudraksh Batra
    Sat, Oct 7, 2023, 8:45 PM
    I am trying to use this plugin but it is not sending notification on restriction met. I am using 4.2 version of moodle
  • Felix Schmitt
    Thu, Oct 19, 2023, 1:42 PM
    Hello, do you update your plugin soon?
    It's sadly not working on 4.2 and now there already is 4.3
  • Raymond Barrett
    Wed, Jan 24, 2024, 7:42 PM
    None of the pro features are showing on my Pulse activity even though I downloaded it from my purchase and installed it. I have also not heard back from support.
  • Raymond Barrett
    Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 8:05 AM
    The issue I had with the pro features was because I only installed 2.0, but I found out from support that I had to also install the moodle_local_pulsepro_1.3 file, which resolved the issue.
  • Raymond Barrett
    Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 8:06 AM
    How does a user unsubscribe from receiving Pulse emails? I tested by disabling notifications in a user's profile/preferences but they seem to still receive emails.
  • Raymond Barrett
    Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 8:57 PM
    Hopefully, the plugin will be able to coincide with user's notification preferences in Moodle so we can comply with email spam legislation in most countries and best practices.
  • Stefan Ost
    Mon, May 27, 2024, 9:57 PM
    I just installed the plugin in Moodle 4.2, but I got this error when adding the activity: Invalid icon system requested '\core\output\icon_system_standard'. How can this be solved?
  • John Anderson
    Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 2:36 AM
    Hi - I am wondering about notifications sent based on an enrollment date. Does pulse handle relative reminders, based on enrollment date. My example would be to complete and evaluation after 3 months had past from the enrollment date. Thanks for ideas.
  • Dave Foord
    Mon, Jul 15, 2024, 4:24 PM
    @John Anderson - If you use the Pulse plugin in combination with https://moodle.org/plugins/availability_relativedate then I think you will be able to achieve what you are wanting.
  • Aleksander Rodakowski
    Tue, Dec 10, 2024, 4:36 AM
    Hi, I was paid for Pulse PRO, but I can't download latest files from bdecent.de. Unfortunately, no one responds to my emails at support@bdecent.de. maybe this way someone responde. 😅
  • IT INSERVER
    Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 9:35 PM
    Hi! Thanks for this fantastic plugin... When will the version compatible with Moodle 4.5 LTS be available?
  • Monika Jenkins
    Wed, Feb 5, 2025, 12:27 AM
    This plugin seems to be great, but is there any plan to have ability to have the same functionality but for a scorm package? I love the notifications and the completion criteria which we cannot do on regular activities, however, most of our content is scorm activities - is there any way to make that work?
  • Aleksander Rodakowski
    Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 3:10 AM
    Hi, any news? When will you release a version for Moodle 4.5?
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