Atutor.no

A module we've (that is Håvard) been working on for a long time is now ready for release to the community! We called it Certify, it is mighty fine, and this is what it does:

Certify will let you add a certificate to a course. The certificate can contain one or more tests, and when a user has reached the pass score / pass percent for the test(s) bundled in the certificate, the user is allowed to download a pdf certificate.

Before the user has reaced the pass score he or she will see a progress bar under the "Certificates" tab, showing how far he or she is on the way to obtaining the certificate.

An instructor (or privileged user) can manage certificates, which means adding them, adding tests to them, and see student status for a given certificate.

Pictures are however more telling than words.

Here is certify for a student

This shows the certificate name, a description, and a progress bar showing how far the student is in obtaining the pass scores for the 8 tests in this course.

In the picture above I am 21% on my way to obtain the pass percent of 80% in all the 8 tests this certificate consist of.

In the picture below I have reached pass percent for all tests in this certificate. The certificate status is then 100%, and I am allowed to downdload a pdf certificate.

A certificate template can be created and uploaded by the instructor. If not a standard certificate is used (taken from the other Atutor Certificates module by Cindy).

Here's a screenshot of the certificate I got from the link above:

Yes, it is sweet!

Certify for an instructor

Here we are at manage -> certify, which shows the certificates in this course (there can be several certificates per course, allthough I imagine most people will only use one).

If we click on the "edit tests" button we get this:

This shows a list of all the tests that are found in this course, and lets you add as many of them as you wish to the certificate. Note that these tests must have a pass score or pass percent set. Also note that Certify only acts as a container. The pass scores or pass percents must be set in the tests themselves, and certify will only do the calculation for you.

The next screenshot shows what you will see when you click the "Student status" button:

..a sorted list of the students results. Note that certify only cares about the best result a student has in a test. That means a student can improve his score in a test (where more takes are allowed), but not the other way around.

That is pretty much it! We are using it in production today, and you can have a look at it in action if you register for the Medical Peace Work course

We have found it to be stable for production use, but there are still some bugs, minor issues and areas for improvement left in it, mainly for admins of it:

• You can upload a pdf template for each certificate, but there is no way to see which template you are using just yet, and
• If you upload a new template you will have to manually delete the old one form the server, as well as any cached files (named typically cert*.pdf (where * is a wildcard). The files are found within the ATutor content folder, in the "certify" folder.
• You will need pdftk installed at your (Linux) server! A server admin must typically do this.
• And you must manually set the path to pdftk in line 100 in download_certificate.php. Here's the line: $exec = '/usr/bin/pdftk '.$template.' fill_form '.$filename.' output '.$filebase.'pdf flatten';, as you can see here our path to pdftk is "/usr/bin/pdftk ".
• There are some tweaks that should be done in the GUI as a radio button isn't selected if you click the table row it belongs to. You will have to hit the actual button!
• And probably some more too

We're adding it here first, and at atutor.ca in a few days - get it while it's hot, give it a go, and give us feedback!