Moodle 2 for vet customising grades for competency based assessment
1. Moodle 2 for VET Courses
One thing that many teachers have uses Moodle for is to enable students to access resources
and activities for Vocational Education and Training (VET). As well as creating resources (or
making them accessible), teachers can provide students with assessment opportunities such
as assignments and quizzes. The gradebook will enable teachers to keep track of these
assessments for reporting purposes.
The first difficulty that a teacher is likely to encounter when using Moodle for VET courses is that
by default it uses numeric grading scales. In VET it is usual to grade on a
satisfactory/unsatisfactory or competent/not yet competent basis. This can be overcome with
the combination of custom scales (on which to grade assignments) and letter grades (to display
numeric grades as either satisfactory/unsatisfactory or competent/not yet competent).
Another issue to consider is whether to set up each unit as a Moodle course, or a whole course
(eg a certificate course) as a Moodle course. I’m advocating the second option. The whole
course is set up as a Moodle course. Each unit becomes a topic. In the gradebook, we would
set up a category for each unit of competency. That way we can track when the student is
competent in a particular unit and also when they have completed the whole certificate.
Here’s a suggested plan to setup Moodle for your VET courses:
● Create a Moodle course for the VET Qualification (eg Certificate II in Business)
● Set up topics one for each unit of competency
(eg BSBITU102A Develop Keyboard Skills)
● Add required resources into topics
● Set up a custom scale (eg Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory)
● Create categories in the gradebook one for each unit of competency
● Add assessments into topics (don’t forget to set the Grade Category)
○ Add assignments (using custom scales)
○ Add quizzes
● Set up letter grades (eg Competent/Not Yet Competent)
● Customise how the grades are aggregated in the categories and the whole course.
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