Listed date on which a certificate has been awarded is confusing for teachers

[nicoroeser]

There is a list of certificates that have been handed out listed on /mod/customcert/view.php?id=<course_ID>. Column "Awarded on" (timecreated) in this list shows the timecreated value for the certificate.

Our testing has shown that

• this date is the date when a student has for the first time used the function for downloading this specific certificate,
• in case a teacher has deleted a certificate in the meantime (using the trash icon), this date is the date of the first download after the last deletion;
• this date does not change when students ask to download the certificate again after they have already downloaded it.

The receiveddate can be totally different from the completion date (the date of a student‘s success). After the analysis above, it is unclear what benefit the receiveddate is for the teachers, who are the ones who can see it.

The fact that receiveddate does not change even though the certificate may have changed between the first and second download seems rather confusing, and is not very useful for teachers.

I suggest to discuss and change the behavior described above. For example, the certificate could be generated once (when it is downloaded for the first time), and be recreated (only) every time the user downloads it AND it has changed. The table could show a list of certificate versions downloaded with a received date each.

[nicoroeser]

As it has been two months since I brought this up, I’d like to send a kind reminder. :-) If some important information is missing for discussion, please tell me, and I’ll try to provide it. Thanks!

[mdjnelson]

Sorry Nico,

I only work on this in my free time and currently haven't had much of that as I have been working on Moodle 3.7 features.

We can't keep track of the changes unfortunately (without a great overhaul of the system) because the certificates are created dynamically each time. They aren't stored, so a comparison can not be made. The issue #38 deals with saving the certificates but it isn't an easy task.

I am not sure what to replace the Received date field with. Not all courses/activities use completion so it would depend on whether this was enabled or not. I could have two fields with one specifying when the user received the certificate, and if completion is enabled another field saying when they completed the task.

Thoughts?

[nicoroeser]

No problem, Mark, I know this kind of situation. Thanks for your update!

I’ve now understood what #38 is about, thanks. :-)

We have discussed the displayed date in our team, and I have thought about the date field a bit. The ideas mostly circle around that teachers should understand what they see in the listing of issued certificates, and that they should understand what available functions do. Much of this can be achieved by minor changes in wording or small additions in the user interface.

• The stored date could be changed: it seems far more useful for teachers to see the date of a student’s most recent download instead of the first download. This change will also require processing existing dates on plugin upgrade (possibly flushing them; or adding a separate column in the database table, and a new column on output, which I’d rather avoid).
• If you like that better, the choice of which date to display(/store?) could be switched by a setting in the plugin options.
• The page with the certificates list could include a sentence that explains what is shown in the table. Then teachers will better understand that the table does not list all students, but only those who have already downloaded their certificate, along with the most recent download date. And that the certificate may differ from the one that a teacher gets if he/she uses the download link now.
• The download link could be annotated in some way so that teachers know that they do not download a stored, but a newly-generated certificate, which may differ from the one the user has on her/his harddisk/printout. (→ #38)
• In any case, perhaps the column heading for the date column could be changed from “Awarded on” to “Issued on”? For me, this seems to better indicate that this shows a different date than teachers might think. But I may just be misunderstanding the English wording.
• This is a slightly different issue, but in this context: teachers do not understand what the Trash link is for. (And I also don’t see its use, it seems to merely delete the log entry – as long as #38 is not resolved.) Certificates are newly generated anyway, so it only removes an entry for a while. Perhaps the link could be removed, optionally with a preference? Or am I misunderstanding something here?

What do you think about these?