29 March 2012, 12:41

Plugin for adding an Individual Learning Plan to Mahara

Many National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) involve the formulation of ILPs to record and keep track of a student's progress throughout the length of the course. These courses use a point system, the course has a set point value that needs to be acheived by the stundents. This is acheived by the selection of units, that have different point values depending on the level of the NVQ. 

This Mahara plugin allows simple ILPs to be maintained. It includes fields for setting the title, description, status, point value, target completion date and the actual date of completion of individual units.  It also does calculations on the points,  displaying the remaining points needed, the aquired points and the total value of the units added. Each ILP is set up to include the title of the course, its description and it's set point value.

The ILP can be added to a Mahara view which can also include related resources and artefacts e.g. a blog, peice of text or google document that ilistates the work done on the units included in the ILP.

The plugin allows a user to have multiple instances of ILPs. So, a user can store ILPs for mulitple NVQs they may partake.

The plugin adds a new 'ILP' tab (similar to 'My Plans') to 'My Portfolio' in Mahara. The code was based on 'My Plans' 

Installation

The plugin is currently available from GitHub.

git://github.com/rossdash/Individual-Learning-Plan.git

Download, unpack and copy the /ilps folder (and included files and folders) into the /artefact folder of your Mahara installation. Then enable the ilps and units from the Plugin Administration interface.

The plugin should work with any Mahara 1.4.x installation . It creates a new artefact_ilps_unit table and a artefact_ilps_points table which have a 1:1 extension of the artefact table. Please test it on a development installation before production deployment.

I created this as part of my dissertation piece at Bournemouth Univercity for my BSc (Hons) Software Engineering course. The customer for the dissertation is Yeovil College's IT Proffessional NVQ Level 3 Assessor. The dissertaion is still ongoing.

I hope it may be useful,

Ross

29 March 2012, 20:27

Hi Ross,

This sounds like a great plugin.

Thanks for helping make Mahara better.

Melissa

30 March 2012, 1:22

Hi Ross.

The link points to Geoff Rowland's CPD plugin. Could you update it.

It works fine, when copied and pasted into browser's URL field though.

Cheers,
Gregor

30 March 2012, 2:45

My appologies,

The link to GitHub is https://github.com/rossdash/Individual-Learning-Plan

01 April 2012, 0:08

Hi Ross,

I just updated the URL in your post in case somebody doesn't read further.

Cheers

Kristina

04 April 2012, 4:17

Hello,

I want to improve the error handling of erroneous data for the points input. Does Mahara have a built in pieform validator for integers? Like it does with dates. Currently the points string is changed straight to an integer so all characters that are not numbers are ignored, however I would prefer an error message was flagged to the user so they know the points value may be incorrect.

Ross

04 April 2012, 5:34

Hello Ross,

You can add a feature/improvment request directly into the bug tracker (https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara). Or suggest code improvement into GIT. For the latest go to the developer pages in the wiki.

Regards,

-dajan

04 April 2012, 8:04

After much searching I found that a rule exists, but the Wiki page had not been updated to include it, i have updated the plugin and the Wiki page. 

10 April 2012, 1:03

Hello Ross,

Thanks for updating the wiki page. Often it is best to do this when you have to go through the process for the first / second time as you then go through the entire work flow. The experienced Mahara developers probably do not consult these pages often and thus, they are easily forgotten.

Cheers

Kristina

23 April 2012, 4:25

This Plugin now includes a French translation as well as English, thanks to Dominique-Alain JAN aka dajan