1. Taking competencies to the next level
Marie-Eve Lévesque, University of Montreal
Hi,
My name is Marie-Eve Lévesque and I work for the University of Montreal, a quite big university in Canada.

2. University of Montreal
Montréal, Québec, Canada
students
5 000 teachers
16 faculties and schools
2 associated universities
Moodle at UdeM
6 developers
3 support technicians (help line)
You can see it here.
I am an analyst-programmer in the Moodle team.
My presentation is “Taking competencies to the next level”, and I will present you what we developed in the past months to improve the functionalities related to competencies, mainly to make possible the assessment of competencies at the activity level.

3. Competencies in Moodle
Competency frameworks, learning plans and tools to manage and assess competencies
Added in Moodle 3.1, with some development from our university
2 levels :
User competencies (learning plan)
Appreciator (new role with permissions for cohorts)
Course competencies
Teacher
Pseudo Activity competencies
Automatic course or user competency achievement
No assessment at the activity level
What we wanted to achieve : the next level!
Competencies in Moodle
I won’t cover what is a competency, let just say it is a skill that students must acquire during their studies.
Does anybody here already uses competencies in Moodle?
Maybe you know that Moodle has everything needed to manage and assess competencies, such as competency frameworks and learning plans.
All of this was added in Moodle 3.1, when it was developed by Moodle HQ and our university.
In Moodle, you have 2 levels of competencies. The first is user competencies, or learning plan competencies, which in our case are assessed by what we call an “appreciator” or “learning plan manager”. It is a new role we added in our Moodle, with some permissions we give via cohorts.
The second level is course competencies, which are assessed by the teacher of each course.
There are also some pseudo activity competencies, which you can use for automatic course or user competency achievement.
But, at no point in Moodle you can assess a competency for an activity, than give an other value for the same competency in another activity and then compare all those activity ratings to assess the user competency.
That is what we wanted to achieve : the next level!

4. How we did it : 2 new plugins
The code in Moodle :
competency -> main classes
admin/tool/lp -> main pages to manage and assess competencies
report/competency -> report for a student in a course
Our plugins :
admin/tool/cmcompetency -> main classes and pages + 1 DB table
report/cmcompetency > assessment page and report for a student
How we did it : We created 2 new plugins.
You should know that the code in Moodle for competencies lies in 3 folders:
competency, with the main classes
admin/tool/lp, with the main pages to manage and assess competencies
and report/competency, that shows the report for a student in a course.
Logically, our new code would go directly in those 3 folders… But we always try to avoid changing the core, as it is hard to maintain, so we created 2 new plugins :
admin/tool/cmcompetency, with the main classes and pages, plus one new database table to save the rating at the activity level
report/cmcompetency, with the assessment page and report for a student
We decided to make 2 plugins instead of one in order to follow the same structure as the core competencies and separate the report from the functions related to the data underneath it.
We then copied everything related to course competencies and replaced “course” by “activity” and that’s almost it! Of course, it is a little bit more complicated than that, but basically that is what we did : we copied all course competency related functionalities.
I will now show you how it works.

5. Demo - Teacher Add competencies to the course (core)
First, the teacher adds the competency to his course using core functionality.

6. Demo - Teacher Add competencies to the activity (core)
Then, he adds the competency to some activities in the same course, also using the core functionality.

7. Demo - Teacher
Assess the competency in an activity (report/cmcompetency)
He then uses a new menu item we added in the activity administration menu, “competencies assessment”. There, he chooses a user, and click on the rating for a competency. This is done by our report/cmcompetency plugin.

8. Demo - Teacher
Assess the competency in an activity (report/cmcompetency)
It shows the user competency summary popup, similar to the one at the course or user level, but for a particular activity. This is a place we needed to write a lot of code to avoid modifying the core. Instead of adding a few conditions related to activities, we had to do new javascript classes, new templates, and so on!
Then, in the user competency summary, the teacher clicks the Rate button, and it shows the Rate popup. We improved the basic popup with a group option, for assignments only, and a rich text editor for the evidence comment, which we also added for the course and user competencies. Honestly, we had to do what we hate, which is to modify the core a little bit, to add this functionality everywhere.
Then, the teacher clicks the Rate button.

9. Demo - Teacher
Assess the competency in an activity (report/cmcompetency)
The new rating is saved and the report page is updated via Ajax. The teacher can then navigate to the next user or search for a particular user. We tried to make this page similar to what exists for course competencies.

10. Demo - Teacher
Bulk rate competencies in an activity (report/cmcompetency)
We also added a functionality for bulk rating, so the teacher can rate many students at the same time. He clicks on the Bulk rating button.

11. Demo - Teacher
Bulk rate competencies in an activity (report/cmcompetency)
Our plugin shows a page with all competencies for this activity. He can then chose a scale value for each competency and save the settings. The rating will be made on the next passage of the cron (typically one minute) because we programmed this as an ad hoc task, to make sure it always work correctly even with courses with a lot of students.
If he wants, he can also rate for a group of students, if the activity has separated groups.

12. Demo - Student View the competencies assessments (tool/cmcompetency)
For the students, we overrode the course menu to add a new “Competencies linked in the course activities” item. On this page, which is available through our tool/cmcompetency plugin, students can chose an activity and view the rating they have for all competencies related to this activity. They can collapse to see more details and comments and then navigate to another activity, and so on.
This was an overview of what our 2 plugins do.

13. How we improved it : additional reports
Our “Monitoring of learning plans” (lpmonitoring) plugin provides some additional reports to view and assess user competencies.
In our case, it is used by an appreciator (learning plan manager).
It is publicly available and already used on many Moodle sites.
We improved it to view activity competencies in addition to course competencies.
This part is not public for the moment as it requires the 2 cmcompetency plugins.
Let’s now see how we improved it : with additional reports in our “Monitoring of learning plans” (or lpmonitoring) plugin.
Does anybody uses this plugin or at least know it exists?
This is a plugin we developed that already provides some additional reports to view and assess user competencies. In our case, it is used by an appreciator (learning plan manager).
We improved it to view activity competencies in addition to course competencies. This new functionality is not public for the moment as it requires the 2 cmcompetency plugins, which have not been released publicly yet. The rest of the plugin is public since a few years.

14. Demo - Appreciator Access the report for a user (report/lpmonitoring)
How it works : appreciators can access the report the same way as before and filter to find the user they want.

15. Demo - Appreciator View the competencies assessments
(report/lpmonitoring)
In the first tab, that shows information about each competency of a learning plan there are new indications related to activities : the total number of ratings in activities, and the number of ratings in activities by scale value.

16. Demo - Appreciator View the competencies assessments
(report/lpmonitoring)
In the Report tab, recently added in lpmonitoring, and that shows details for all evaluations for a competency, there also is a new filter and the possibility to search and filter the activities.
That summarises our developments for activity competencies.

17. Other improvements for competencies
lpmonitoring 1.3 (july 2019) improvements
Focus on helping appreciators to do their job by finding rapidly students in special situations
In the last year, we also did other improvements for competencies, which were released in lpmonitoring in july.

18. Report tab Bulk rating Tags Comments User list navigation
Competency reset
They are listed here. I won’t explain them today, let’s just say that those improvements were made from comments received by our users. The focus was helping appreciators to do their job, mostly by finding rapidly students in special situations, for example students in difficulties. Tags, in particular, are pretty useful for that purpose.

19. Future improvements for competencies
Next year lpmonitoring improvements :
Report for teachers
Summary report
Date intervals report
Share the 2 cmcompetencies plugins, if there is demand for that
Future improvements for competencies
Other improvements will be made in lpmonitoring in the next year, such as a summary report and a date intervals report.
We would also like to share the 2 cmcompetencies plugins I presented you today, if there is demand for that. So, if you would like to use them, do not hesitate to contact me. It will help us know if we can take the time to share them.

20. Questions? Marie-Eve Lévesque University of Montreal
Are there any questions?