Understanding Web-Based, Test, and Survey Learning Components

Before you create compliant web-based, test, and survey learning components you must define configuration options that determine how your system works with compliant content.

Web-based, test, and survey learning components represent types of learning that are self-paced and delivered over the Internet or an Intranet. Learners access web-based, test, and survey learning components by clicking hyperlinks from self-service pages. Web-based, test, and survey learning components can be internally developed content or they can be custom-made or stock courses developed by and purchased from third-party vendors.

Web-based, test, and survey learning components can be standards compliant or standards non compliant. The advantage of using learning components that are standards compliant is that you can load content files and retrieve learner progress data (such as scores and lesson completion) from the content. Enterprise Learning Management can then use these scores to determine passing.

See Understanding the Learning Component Completion Engine and Understanding the Class Completion Engine..

Enterprise Learning Management supports the following structures:

• Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) 1.1, 1.2, and 2004, Edition 4.

  See http://www.adlnet.org.

• Aircraft Industry Computer Based Training Committee (AICC).

When you create the learning component you load the content metadata files for that offering. Then learners can launch the content by clicking a hyperlink. Since the content is compliant, the content sends progress and score data back to your system.

You do not have to require learners to pass compliant learning components. If you do not make passing required for a compliant learning component then the learning component completion engine would not use the learner's passing status when determining the learner's completion status. However, if you do want to make passing required, you must define a minimum score that the system will use to determine the learner's passing status.

The system determines the learner's score based on the compliant content's lessons. When you upload compliant course content you can see the lessons that make up the course. At that time you can select which lessons you want to count toward the overall component score. Also, when you upload the course content, part of the data that gets uploaded is the mastery score for the lessons. The mastery score is the score the content provider has established as the minimum passing score.

As learners complete lessons, they are given a passing status and a score (sometimes they are only given a status. See table below). The Auto Mark Class Completion process retrieves the passing status and lesson scores (if provided) from the content provider. The system then calculates the learner's learning component score that will be compared with the minimum score that you established on the Completion page. The learning component score is based on a learner's aggregate performance across all of the lessons that have been marked as counting toward the learning component score.

The learning component score is the ratio of the number of selected lessons completed successfully to the total number of selected lessons in the class. So if a compliant content offering contained 6 lessons, and you selected four of them to count toward the score, and the learner completed two of them, he or she would receive a score of 50 (2/4).

The system determines when to grant credit for a lesson by evaluating the lesson status returned and, in some cases, the lesson scores. The following table shows how the system interprets the lesson status and the learner's lesson score (if applicable):

When a learner receives a lesson status of Passed, the score is not applicable. The system automatically interprets that as a success. The only time the system uses the score is when the learner receives a lesson status of Completed. In this case, the system doesn't know if the learner met the minimum requirements for passing the lesson, so it uses the score to determine whether to grant the learner credit for the lesson.

When a learner receives a success rating of Success for a lesson, the system updates the learners component score. When the learner achieves the minimum score the system sets the learning component passing status to Pass. If the learner has not achieved a passing status of Pass by the end of the learning period the system sets the learning component completion status to Incomplete.