Understanding automatic evaluation

The competency, learning objective, and activity evaluation system automatically evaluates users as they work through competency structures. If you modify competency structures that users are currently working on, the evaluation system can also automatically re-evaluate each user's progress to determine if they meet the new requirements and update their results accordingly.

Table of contents

1. Initiating automatic evaluation
2. Disabling automatic evaluation
3. Manually initiating an evaluation
4. Monitoring the re-evaluation service

Initiating automatic evaluation

The following actions can initiate an automatic evaluation for an Approved competency:

• Completing a child competency or learning objective.
• Adding parents or children to an associated learning objective.
• Removing parents or children from an associated learning objective.
• Changing or removing an activity’s achievement threshold.
• Changing an activity's assessment method (this erases the previous rubric or numeric assessment for that activity).
• Sharing or unsharing competencies with a child org unit.

• Note  If your organization enabled the Status settings option, only Approved competencies (this includes Approved competencies that you edit in Draft mode and re-Approve again) can be re-evaluated. If your organization disabled the Status settings option, any competency changes you make can also initiate re-evaluation.

After you set a learning objective to Ready for evaluation, the following actions can initiate an automatic evaluation:

• Completing a child learning objective or activity.
• Adding or removing a child learning objective or activity.
• Changing or removing an activity's achievement threshold.
• Changing an activity's assessment method (this erases the previous rubric or numeric assessment for that activity).
• Sharing or unsharing learning objectives with a child org unit (learning objectives are automatically shared if you share its associated parent competencies).

Allow automatic competency evaluation after users achieve it

Once users achieve a competency, they are not automatically re-evaluated again for that element unless you set evaluation settings to do so.

1. On the Competency Home page, click on the competency you want to change evaluation settings for.
2. In the Evaluating Settings section, select the Allow re-evaluation of users who have achieved this competency check box.
3. Click Save.

Disabling automatic evaluation

You can also disable automatic evaluations for users (even if they have not achieved a competency) by disabling the Can be Evaluated role permission. You can disable the automatic evaluation by turning off the DOME variable d2l.Tools.Competencies.Settings.AutomaticReeval. If automatic evaluation is disabled, users need to manually initiate evaluation for each element.

Manually initiating an evaluation

If your organization uses manual evaluation, a notice about an outdated competency or learning objective appears on the Results page of every element affected by the change. For example, if an activity’s Achievement threshold is changed, the notice will appear on the Results page of the activity and its parents, all the way up the structure to the competency.

Manually initiate an evaluation

1. On the Competency Home page, click on the competency or learning objective you want to re-evaluate.

   Note  If you want to re-evaluate results for an activity, click Structure on the Edit Learning Objective page, then click on the activity you want to evaluate.

2. Click Results.
3. Click Re-evaluate.

Re-evaluation requests are placed in a queue and processed in sequence. Depending on the number of requests already in the queue, there might be a delay between the time of your request and when users are evaluated.

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Monitoring the re-evaluation service

When a competency structure change initiates evaluation, the elements affected are added to a table in the re-evaluation database and processed by the re-evaluation service the next time it runs. The Competency Service Jobs page lists the elements in the database table.

If automatic re-evaluation is disabled, elements are still added to the database table but they are flagged to be ignored by the re-evaluation service until a user manually requests re-evaluation by clicking the Re-evaluate button on the Results page. Once you manually initiate re-evaluation, you can check and see if the element is processed from the Competency Service Jobs page. The re-evaluation service normally runs at five-minute intervals.

Note  Users require the role permission See Competency Service Jobs to access the Competency Service Jobs page.

Access the Competency Service Jobs page

1. Click Competency Service Jobs in the Admin Tools widget, or from the Admin Tools menu on the minibar.
2. If list is not updated automatically, click Refresh.

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