Three rules you can’t live without: The Personalized Learning Designer

Even if you have heard of Open LMS ' Personalized Learning Designer (PLD), you may still not know what to do with this extremely versatile feature. The PLD is a tool that works on your behalf to interact, communicate, and route student activity within the course. Rules are created by adding events, conditions, and actions to enhance your Moodle™ classroom. Starting with these basic rules will allow you to automate facilitation tasks that you would have manually completed in the past.

1. Rule name: Welcome This rule will send an email to students upon first access of the course and also redirect the student to the course syllabus. Be sure to add a condition to stop this rule from triggering every time the student enters the course.

• Event:
  • Course Entered
• Conditions:
  • Activity viewed: Choose “has not” been viewed and “Select an activity”, which is the resource for the syllabus in your course.
  • User role check: Select “Student”.
  • Select “All” of the conditions must be fulfilled.
• Action:
  • Send email: Select From “Teacher” and To “Triggering User”. Create template email and include the use of tokens to personalize the email, such as the Course name and User name tokens.
  • Go to activity: “Select activity” and choose the delay time before being redirected.

2. Rule name: Assignment Receipt Using the assignment submission receipt rule will assist your students to be responsible for their participation in the course. If the student contacts you about a particular assignment in which they say they have submitted, you will be able to ask them to send you their assignment receipt that verifies that they had submitted the assignment. As well as, you can review the history tab within the PLD to view if the rule triggered an email to the student.

• Event:
  • Quiz or Assignment Submitted: Choose “Assignment” for the Activity Type and leave Activity as “Any of Type” to allow this rule to run for all activities in the course.
• Condition:
  • No Condition: Always run
• Action:
  • Display alert: Create template alert and include the Activity name token, as well as, a reminder of the duration of time to allow for manual grading.
  • Send email: Select From “Teacher” and To “Triggering User”. Create template email and include the Activity name token.

3. Rule name: Come to Class No longer is the need for you to review the last login date of your students. With this PLD rule a reminder will be automatically sent to the student and the facilitator to alert them both to a student who may be falling behind in course activity.

• Event:
  • Recurring event: Choose “Weekly on Sunday’s” ending the last day of class.
• Condition:
  • Course login: Choose “has not logged into the course” within the last “7” days.
• Action:
  • ​Send email: Select From “Teacher” and To “Triggering User and Teacher”. Create template email.

Since PLD rules are tracked via the History tab, facilitators are able to view what communication and interaction has happened automatically between the rules and the student. To access the History tab go to Settings > Course administration > Personalized Learning Designer > History tab then filter by the rule you would like to view the history for. Join us for the Personalized Learning Designer webinar to learn more about using and creating rules to automate your facilitation.

~Janelle Gieseke, Senior Corporate Trainer