Opus Pro nows allows you to set a number of features to identify a course and to track whether the key aspects of the course have been passed or not.
Essentially the course is comprised of all the topics in a publication – even if there is only one. It measures the success on the basis of Question objects and does not relate to the original Opus scoring system used by the Store Score action.
Opus keeps a Course Log (the course Summary) and stores it in a preset variable Q_SCORE_COURSE_SUMMARY. This can simply be a summary with score or can include a full record of the students activity which you can then print out using a print action or email to the course administrator using the standard email action. It automatically includes the date the course was taken and the user’s name.
The Course tab in Publication Properties allows you to set the title of the course, the name of the trainer or administrator of the course and the email you can later use to send the Summary or other information to if appropriate.
By default the Course Name is taken from the publication title but you can edit this as you wish.
The Administrator/Teacher box is to allow a record of the tutor for the course if required. This is automaticallyt stored in the variable Q_COURSE_ADMINISTRATOR.
The Email entry is to allow you to capture an email for subsequently sending the course summary to the relevant tutor for moderation or simply for the records. This is automatically stored in the variable Q_COURSE_ADMINISTRATOR _EMAIL.
Any question can also be set to be Course Critical which means that if it is not answered correctly the user has failed the course irrespective of the score they get on other questions.
Each publication is treated as a single course but the course can be divided up into topics and key aspects of the user’s performance on each topic can be tracked individually.
The names of the topics and their pass mark thresholds are set up via the Course tab in Publication Properties. A grid is provided into which you can type a name or description for the topic. By clicking the Percentage icon you can decide whether the topic should be tested by reference to a percentage or a score value and you then type in the relevant value or percentage in the Pass column.
By setting a topic to be critical you can tell Opus to fail the whole course if a particular topic has been failed.
A range of course and topic variables are provided for you to track the results. There is also a Topic Condition trigger and a Course Condition trigger which means you can check the status of a topic or the whole course and set a series of actions based on that condition.
Note:
Topics and courses are only passed or failed if they have been completed – that is, if all the questions in them have been answered.
The most common use for this is likely to be to check whether a particular topic has been passed or failed and put up feedback saying which topics should be revised.
We have also included Q_TOPIC_PASSED, Q_TOPIC_FINISHED, Q_SCORE_COURSE_PASSED and Q_SCORE_COURSE_FINISHED variables for you to access with OpusScript if required – these are Boolean variables and will hold true or false. Remember that the topic variables are array variables and therefore need to be used with an index after them - as Q_TOPIC_PASSED[0], Q_TOPICS_PASSED[1] etc.