Learner Records & Reporting

Three levels of record sit behind a learner taking a course. Knowing which holds what makes reporting straightforward and stops you reporting the wrong number.

The three levels

• Learner record — one per learner per course. Holds their overall standing: status, completion, pass or fail, best score, total time and their bookmark. This is what you report on.
• Course attempt — one per pass through the content, so a resit is recorded separately rather than overwriting the first try.
• Course session — one per launch. Mostly useful when investigating a specific dispute.

Resuming

A learner returning to an unfinished course picks up their existing record, and their bookmark is handed back to the content so it resumes where they left off. Content that does not support bookmarking simply restarts — that is a property of the course, not a setting you can change.

A part-finished course does not wipe a score

Results are saved field by field, so a learner who saves their place part-way through does not blank out a score recorded earlier in the same attempt.

Learners are identified by their account

A result is always recorded against the signed-in account, never against anything the course content claims. Content can only ever write to the record of the person running it.

Worked Examples

• "Who still needs to do this?" — filter learner records by course and status.
• "Did they pass first time?" — look at attempts, not the learner record.
• "They say they finished it but it says incomplete" — check sessions to see whether their last session ended normally.

The four standards report progress in different shapes. ActiveManage normalises them, so a single report can cover courses built to different standards and still be honest.

Status

SCORM 1.2 has one status field that mixes together have they finished and did they pass. The newer standards separate the two, so both readings are recorded:

• Completion status — completed, incomplete, not attempted or unknown.
• Success status — passed, failed or unknown.
• Status — the overall standing, which is usually what a report should show.

A completion is not a pass

A learner can finish a course and fail its assessment. If your compliance reporting only looks at completion, you will overstate compliance. Report on both, or report on success status where a pass is what actually matters.

Scores

Scores are recorded both raw and scaled, because SCORM 1.2 reports a mark out of a maximum while the newer standards report a fraction. Storing both means courses built to different standards can sit side by side in one report and be compared fairly. Whether a score counts as a pass is judged against whatever pass mark the package itself declared.

Time

Time is recorded in seconds and presented per standard, so you never have to interpret a standard's own time format to total up how long people spent.

Worked Examples

• Regulatory return: report on success status — "passed" — not completion.
• Engagement reporting: completion plus time spent tells you whether people are actually reading the material or clicking through it.
• Course quality review: a course everybody completes but many fail is either badly written or badly pitched.

Beyond an overall score, a course can report exactly what a learner did. Two records hold it, and both answer questions a score cannot.

Question responses

One record per question or interaction — the question, its type, what the learner answered, what the correct answer was, whether it was judged correct, and how long they took.

This is what lets you see which question everybody gets wrong, which wrong answer is doing the damage, and where learners hesitate. It is often more useful for improving a course than the pass rate is.

Learning objectives

One record per objective the course declared, with its own status and score. Content organised around objectives — common in compliance and competency training — can then be reported at objective level rather than only as a single overall pass.

The caveat that matters

Both depend entirely on the course reporting them. A great deal of published content reports a final score and nothing else, in which case these records will be empty however you configure ActiveManage. That is a property of the course, and the only way to change it is to ask the author to enable interaction reporting when they export.

If question-level reporting matters to you, specify it when commissioning content rather than discovering afterwards that it is not there.

Resits

Responses and objectives are recorded against the attempt number, so a resit is stored separately rather than overwriting the original.

Worked Examples

• Course improvement: question 7 has a 20% pass rate — the question is ambiguous, not the learners.
• Competency mapping: report by objective to show which specific competencies a team is weak on.
• Procurement: make interaction reporting a requirement in your content specification.

Recording a completion is rarely the end of it. Usually something should happen — a training requirement marked satisfied, a certificate issued, a renewal date set, a manager notified.

How results are picked up

ActiveManage signals every settled result, at the moment a learner's attempt ends, to the same automation you use elsewhere:

• Table rules on the learner record, for straightforward reactions such as setting a field or sending an e-mail.
• The Workflow Builder, where the reaction has conditions or several steps.
• Custom code, where the reaction is specific to how your system works.

It fires once, at the end

The signal is sent when an attempt ends, not every time a learner saves their place. A course that saves forty times and then completes produces one notification, not forty — so it is safe to send an e-mail or issue a certificate from it.

What you can react to

The learner, the course, the outcome, the score, the time taken and the attempt number — plus the row in your own course catalogue, so you can resolve straight back to your own record.

Worked Examples

• Certification: on a pass, generate a certificate document and e-mail it to the learner.
• Renewals: on a pass, set a "next due" date twelve months out; a scheduled workflow chases anyone approaching it.
• Access control: on a pass of the safety module, add the learner to the group that may book the equipment.
• Escalation: on a second failed attempt, raise a task for the learner's manager.

This matters if you are relying on eLearning records for compliance, and it is much better understood before an audit than during one.

Identity is reliable

A result is always recorded against the signed-in account. Course content cannot name a different learner, and a modified package cannot write to somebody else's record. If the record says an account completed a course, that account did.

Scores are asserted by the content

This is inherent to all of these standards, not a limitation of ActiveManage: none of SCORM, xAPI or cmi5 marks work on the server. The course, running in the learner's own browser, decides what score to report and then reports it. Anyone comfortable with their browser's developer tools can report whatever they like.

What follows from that

• Treat completions and scores as evidence of engagement. For the overwhelming majority of training programmes that is exactly what is needed, and it is what these standards were designed for.
• Do not describe a SCORM pass as an invigilated assessment in a policy or a regulatory return. It is not one, and writing that down creates a problem you do not need.
• Where a result must genuinely be trusted — a qualifying examination, a regulated competency — build the assessment into your own application, with the questions and the marking held on the server.
• Think about what the completion gates. Recording that somebody watched a module is fine. Automatically granting access to something hazardous on the strength of it deserves more thought.

Course packages are web content

A package is HTML and JavaScript hosted on your own domain. Only publish packages from suppliers you trust, exactly as you would only install software from sources you trust.

Worked Examples

• Fire safety awareness: engagement evidence is entirely appropriate — record and report the completion.
• Regulated professional competency: use the course for learning, but assess separately with server-side marking.
• Machine operation sign-off: pair the module with a supervised practical check recorded by an assessor.