Dashboard

The dashboard in Moodle represents the completion status inside of Moodle courses to both managers and learners.

The dashboard can represent the completion status of any item inside of a course, not just SCORM modules. This makes it more useful if you want to blend your learning, including items such as classroom sessions, PDFs and Moodle Quizzes.

The dashboard is a block that can be added to any page. Typically we expect this to be displayed on the ‘my’ page of Moodle. This is the first page to display when logged in.

The learner dashboard

The dashboard shows each course the learner must complete with a progress bar that fills up as they complete items inside the course.

When the learner clicks on an item a popup shows them what items need to be completed and whether or not they have completed them.

Clicking an item will open it. Clicking view course will open the course.

Viewing the course allows us to lay out our materials in a more traditional Moodle style.

This is useful where you want to place the learning in a deeper context as well as lead the learner through the various items.

The manager dashboard

The manager dashboard shows the courses that staff have to complete.

The % shown is the % of staff who have completed that course.

Clicking on a course will open a popup that lists the members of staff who need to complete the course and whether or not they have completed this

Clicking on ‘my learners’ will open a new page displaying all of their staff.

The % shown is the % of all dashboard courses the member of staff has completed.

Filters at the top of the screen can be used to narrow the selection of staff shown.

Clicking on a name will show a popup with a list of the courses they have to complete.

Next to each course name the % of the way through that course will be shown.

Setting up the dashboard

You must have imported or created your hierarchy in to Moodle in order to use the managers dashboard. There is a separate manual for this.

We do not recommend using the dashboard to represent more than 10 courses.

As a pre-requisite, you will need to know how to create a new course and enrol learners on to it. If you do not know this, it is recommended that you first complete our basic admin course or download the guides on how to complete these steps.

The dashboard builds itself automatically using some criteria. The criteria is :

For managers there are additional criteria for displaying their staff :

To set up a new dashboard course we are going to create a new course - Site administration > Courses > Manage Courses and Categories > Create new course.

The course full name will be the name displayed on the dashboard. You can update this at any time.

The course short name is a unique system name created by you.

You must start the short name with MAN in order to display it on the dashboard.

The other setting that you

User enrolled on course

Completion criteria set inside course

Course short name contains MAN+ +

User enrolled on course

Completion criteria set inside course

Course short name contains MAN+ +

Assigned manager tags

+

must change on this page is enable completion tracking which must be set to yes.

Setting the criteria

When you are adding items to the course, you can now set the criteria of when Moodle considers each item as complete. This setting varies depending on what the item is.

In the first screenshot we can see the completion settings for a SCORM module. When editing the SCORM settings we can see that there are several criteria that we can set.

Be careful to ensure that you are checking for the right criteria. For instance, if you have said that a passing score is required, does the module have a test in it? If it doesn’t, the learners will not be able to achieve the required criteria.

In the second screenshot we can see that the only criteria is whether or not the learner has viewed the materials. This is typical for a PDF.

Checking that items have completion criteria

If you are unsure whether or not you have added criteria, you can check on the course page. If you are looking at the main course you will notice ticks next to items that have completion criteria attached.

Creating the completion criteria for the whole course

Now that we have several items in the course we can select the ones that contribute towards the course completion criteria. These are the items that will show on the dashboard as requiring completion.

Go to Course administration > Course completion.

Setting the criteria

It is up to you to decide what the course completion criteria is. Our suggestion is that you focus on the Activity completion settings.

Here you will see all of the items in the course that you have attached completion criteria to.

Tick the items that contribute towards the

completion and save the changes.

Checking your settings

Now that you have created your settings, it is prudent to check that the settings you think you entered are correct.

We can see these settings as well as track completion of the course by looking at a report inside of the course.

Go to Course administration > Reports > Course completion.

Inside the Course completion report you will see a column for each item that contributes towards the course completion as well as a column for the overall completion.

It is useful to know that these will tick off as your learners complete the items and the course.

You have now set a course up so that it will display in both the learners and managers dashboard. If this is the first course you have set up to display in the dashboard, it is likely that you will need to add the dashboards to the default homepage.

Adding the dashboards to the homepage

The dashboards are actually blocks inside of Moodle that need to be added to the homepage. At the CLC we usually use the ‘My’ page as our homepage as it allows us to create dashboards for our learners.

We can edit the default My page by going to Site administration > Appearance > Default my home page.

Be careful! This will probably look exactly the same as the page when you log in to the site. Often you can customise the wrong page and will spend hours wondering why learners cannot see what you have added.

To check you are on the right page, check that the

URL is http://YOURADDRESS/my/indexsys.php

When on the page click on your name on the top right of the screen and select Blocks editing on.

You will now be able to make changes to the page. To enable the learner dashboard scroll to the bottom of the page where there is a dropdown called “Add a block”.

Adding the learner dashboard

Click on the dropdown and select the option My dashboard. This will add the learner dashboard to the homepage for all users.

You may be taken to the top of the screen, where the block will have been added to the bottom of the screen.

Moving the block around

Each page is split in to three columns. You can have any block sit in either the left, central or right side. Not all blocks suit being in any of the positions however the choice is yours.

To move the block around click on the cog icon on the block and select Configure My Dashboard block.

When editing the location settings, make sure you are in the lower ‘On this page’ section.

The region dictates the column, with ‘content’ being the central area.

You can also move the block up and down the column by giving it a ‘weight’. The lower the weight, the higher it appears on screen.

Adding the managers dashboard

Adding the managers dashboard is exactly the same as the steps taken for the learners dashboard apart from the block type you are adding.

This time select to add the ‘Managers dashboard’.

If you cannot see the option to add one of the blocks, this means that the block is already on the page.