Course Features (FrontEnd)

Frontend Course Management for course administrators, teachers, and students

• Announcements
• Report Card
• Newsletter (Course)
• Manage Menu
• Course Forum
• Gradebook
• Course Stats
• User/Objects Grid

Announcements

The “Announcement” module adds a news and communication board to your course.

The announcements area allows the teacher or person managing the course to publish a communication for the students, sending a personal notification to each user’s e-mail box.

View and manage Announcements

All the course users with view permissions on the module can read announcements 

Students will be able to read and archive under the “history” tab, announcements they can see.

This is the full view for user roles with edit permission on the module (i.e., course administrators, teachers, tutors):

Insert an announcement

When adding a new announcement, you can define:

• Title
• Mark as important: the announcement text will appear highlighted
• Description: consider this text will be also sent by email or SMS, avoid using complex HTML structures.
• Recipients: Announcements can be published for all or just some subscribed users, select:
  • Only me: if you are preparing the text and don't want it to be sent yet
  • All: all the users subscribed to this course
  • Select: will prompt the list of subscribed users that will be able to see this announcement

Report Card

This module shows to the user his own scores in tests, SCORM and classroom activities.

Visibility of each evaluation item can be set in gradebook module

Newsletter (Course)

This module allows course managers (i.e., administrators, teachers, courses) to mass-email users subscribed to subscribed users.

Features:

• Define the sender, the subject, and the message of the communication.
• One or more attachments may be included in the newsletter.
• Select all or some users

It is also possible to choose which users to send the communication to based on the language in which the platform is configured.

The communication can be sent either by e-mail or SMS (when this service is managed by the platform).

Check also the Global Newsletter settings

Manage Menu

This module is generally assigned only to course administrators, with view and edit permissions, and located under

Teacher Area > Manage Menu

This module will let you:

• Add new modules to your course
• Edit menu item names
• Change module permissions

Changes made here will affect only the present course specific menu, and won't reflect on general menu templates or any other course: this will give you maximum flexibility with menu management and customization.

If you need to apply changes to several courses, consider assigning or creating a menu template from general administration, or ask a god admin to do that.

Please refer to the general menu management feature for details.

Course Forum

Course forums will be available to all course users, or only selected course users

The feature is usually located under the “Collaborative Area” menu, but you can use the menu management feature to:

• move the link
• rename the link
• assign viev/create/moderate permissions for each subscription role
• remove the feature from your course

Check the global community forum guide for details about forum creation and management

Gradebook

The gradebook is one of the most important and useful course features, used to manage all the evaluation activities in a course:

• Test Learning Objects
• SCORM objects with score
• Classroom activities

Overview

View Answer stats

Edit test gradebook options

 

Use the “Edit” icon for each test to see a list of the scores for all the user. You will also be able to:

Configure:

• Weight of the test score in the final score calculation
• Show or hide the test score in user ratecard
• Use or ignore the test score in the final score calculation

Plus, for each user you can

• View and edit the final score
• View the full test execution (see below)
• Edit the execution date
• Add a comment to be displayed on user scorecard
• Cancel last execution, so the user ca take the test again

Test execution detail

Add a new activity

Here, you can also manually add more scores to be calculated for the final course score:

• Activity: record user evaluation score for external activities, not done directly in the platform
• SCORM Results: is a SCORM object has some test, here you can add it to the gradebook

Detail

View History

Edit Final score

Click on the icons on the “Final score” column to:

• Recalculate the final score for all users
• Manually edit the final score for all users

Course Stats

Forma provides different stats to monitor course and user progress:

• Usage Stats: monitors the global course activity, by tracking how many course sessions and operation each user takes
• User Stats: tracks the progress status of each user on the course learning objects
• LO Stats: shows at a glance how many users completed each learning object
• User Object Grid: detailed report of user's status over each LO, with the ability to edit dates and completion status.
  Check the UO Grid page of this guide for details

These features are usually located under the “Stats Area” of the course menu

Usage Stats

Click on the username for a detail of the user's sessions in this course:

User Stats

User statistics provide the teacher with a report on the activities of each individual, highlighting their level of progress in the course.

By clicking on the name of each user, their progress status for each course object can be viewed.

 

Displays:

• Filters
• Status: click to edit user status on the selected learning objects
• Learning Objects: number of learning object new / started / completed

 

Filter for the desired criteria, or click on a username for details:

LO Stats

In statistics by object, a comparison can be made regarding the status of all the users in relation to a specific learning object.

It is also possible to view the aggregated results of a survey.

On the initial screen, the objects for which the comparison is to be made can be selected by clicking on the magnifying glasses.

User/Objects Grid

The “User Object Grid” module allows:

• display detailed information on user status and scores on each learning object
• edit user status and completion dates
• reset user tracks on learning object
• export detailed reports

Overview

User Report

Click on a username to see detailed information:

• Name: Click to check details on this object and reset user status
• Status: click to edit
• First / Last access date: click to edit

LO Details