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