Overview

With the Skills feature, you can make sure the course content is compliant with standards by adding skills to it. You can upload or create your own skill set. Skills are comprised of capabilities that learners need to acquire by taking the course. For example, the skills for the Graphic Design course would contain all the capabilities associated with the field of graphic design taught by the course. Created skills can be stored in the resources library and reused for other courses. This LMS makes it possible to align content and assessments with competencies, then see a coverage analysis of how well your course covers them. Before you start using the Mastery feature, you have to install it from the App Center. 

Please note that Skills & Mastery are part of the AI 360 add-on.

Adding skills

After you install the feature from the App Center, you can start adding your skills. To add skills, go to the Resources tab, then click Add.

Then select Skills from the pop-up. 

Enter a name, the library, and description, then click Save.

After saving the skill set, you can start adding the individual skills by clicking the "Add skills" button.

Select whether you want to add skills using a form or import them from a file.

Adding skills using a form

If you select the form option, enter the approximate number to add, click Continue.

Enter the optional code, optional name, and description for each competency, and click Save.

Skills can be structured so that child skills appear under a parent skill. If you have existing skills and you want the new skills to be nested under an existing one, select the parent skill in the Structure section before clicking Save.

Adding skills from a file

If you select the "Import from a file" option, select the file from your local storage and click Import. Each line of the CSV file must be in the form:

Reordering and deleting skills

To reorder skills, select them and click the Up and Down arrows. 

To change the nesting of skills, select them and click on the Left and  Right arrows.

To delete skills, select them and click Delete.

Associating courses with skills

Before you associate a course with a set of skills, go to the course, visit its Admin/Tabs area and make sure the Mastery tab is enabled.

Please note that in order to enable the Mastery tab first, you have to enable assessments for the course via its Admin/Configure/Assessments area.

To associate a course with a set of skills, visit its Mastery tab and click "Add skills".

You can add a new set of skills, or you can select one from the Library.

If you select Library, you can filter and select the set of skills from the list, then click Save.

You can associate more than one set of skills with a course.

You can add as many skills as you like by clicking the "Add skills" button. Once a set of skills is added to the course, you can see a list of the skills that are associated with the course. To delete the skills, click on

After you associate skills with modules and assessments, the Skills tab lists the modules and assessments that are teaching and measuring each skill. 

Here you can ignore a subset of skills if they don't apply within the course. The included skills are indicated in the "Included" column.

To Ignore/Include skills, select them and click the appropriate button. If you ignore skills, they will be ignored when computing the coverage, when displaying a set of skills for a module/assessment, and also in the learner view within that course.

If you click on a skill, it goes to the skill information page that shows the parent/child skills, modules, and assessments associated with the skill. Further down the page, is the "Rating distribution" bar chart and the "Mapping distribution" pie chart.

To tag the module with skills, open the applicable module and click Skills.

The available skills are displayed. Click Edit.

Select the applicable skills from the list and click Save.

Modules that are associated with skills are indicated with a "graph" mastery icon on their tiles.

Coverage analysis

After tagging course content and assessments with skills, you can see in the Coverage tab the coverage analysis of how well the course covers the skills.

Note that in order to see analytics, you must first set skills for modules and assessments.

Mastery rules

You can add mastery rules that trigger specific actions when a learner achieves a certain mastery level, drops below a threshold for certain skills for a specified number of days, or maintains a mastery level for a specified number of days. To add a new rule, click Add rule.

Select the skill, define the range, and the Duration, then click Save.

After the rule is created, click "Add action". You can add multiple actions to a rule.

A pop-up will open with the available actions.

The available actions are the following:

Add to group

Add the user as a member into a specific group

Award badge

Award a badge to the user

Award certificate

Award a coupon to the user

Award coupon

Award a certificate to the user

Award points

Award points to the user

Enroll in a course

Enroll the user into a specific course

Hide assessment

Hide an assessment from the user

Hide module

Hide a module from the user

Lock module

Lock a module. Click here for more details regarding drip content 

Remove from group

Remove the user as a member from a specific group

Send custom notification

Send a custom notification to the user

Show assessment

Show an assessment to the user

Show module

Show a module to the user

Unlock module

Unlock a module. Click here for more details regarding drip content.

Webhook

Invoke an API. Click here for more details regarding Webhooks.

xAPI

Invoke xAPI. Click here for more details regarding xAPI.

After a rule is added, you can edit it by clicking the Edit icon, or you can choose to remove it.

You can add more than one rule and for multiple skills.

Mastery options

In the Options tab, you can set various options for the competencies, such as customizing the mastery cutoff levels and coloring.

In the mastery calculation area, you can select how to calculate the mastery level of proficiencies. The available options are:

If you select the "Decaying average" option for mastery calculation, you'll have to define the weight for the most recent skill measurement.

When calculating mastery ratings with a decaying average, each new rating is given a higher weight than the previous ratings’ weighted average. A typical equation for decaying average using a 70% weight looks like this:
Rating 1: 4
Rating 2: 3
Rating calculation: (4*.30) + (3*.70) = 3.30

If a learner completes a third assessment that rates that particular skill, then the equation takes the previous average and adds the weighted new rating:
Rating 3: 3.5
Rating calculation: (3.30*.30) + (3.5*.70) = 3.44

Default mastery configuration

The default mastery configuration allows you to specify the mastery calculation rules that are used when calculating mastery values that are displayed in the home dashboard mastery widget and the profile "Mastery" area. This is important because those mastery values can include skills that are measured in more than one course, and thus you cannot apply the mastery calculation rules associated with just one specific course since they can vary. By setting up the default mastery configuration, you can define a default setting that is used when calculating mastery whose skills come from multiple sources.

To set this up, click Admin/Mastery, then click Edit to configure the desired settings.

Here you can give a name for the settings, select the mastery display, mastery calculation, threshold, and more. After you have finished configuring the settings, click Save.

Adding skills to modules

If you associate a course with a set of skills, you can tag its modules with the skills that it should be teaching and its assessments with the skills that it should be assessing. To set skills for a module, go to the module, then visit the Set skills tab. If you added skills for your course as detailed above, then here you will the skills associated with the course. Select the skills that best suit your module and click Save.

To edit skills, click Edit. To clear skills from the module, click Clear.

Adding skills to assessments

You can also set skills for individual assessments. To set skills for an assessment, go to the assessment, then visit the Set skills tab. Select the skills that best suit the assessment, then click Save.

To edit skills, click Edit. To clear skills from the assessment, click Clear.

Adding skills to quiz questions

You can add skills to individual quiz questions. Please note that if you add skills to a question, they will replace the existing assessment skills. Each score for a question that has skills is considered to be a separate data point for mastering that skill. For example, if you have two questions in a quiz assessment that are associated with the skill X, and the learner scores 5 out of 10 on one question and 8 out of 10 on the following question, then their rating for skill X would be the best (80%) or average (65%) depending on the mastery option settings for that course. Note that we don't currently support tagging of questions in question banks.

To add skills to a quiz question, visit the question and click "Set skills".

Select the skills and click Save. 

If you visit the Questions tab for a quiz assessment, questions that have skills are indicated with a green tag, and if you hover over the tag, the skills are displayed.

Adding skills to rubric criteria

If you use a Rubric to grade the assessment, you can add skills as rubric criteria. To learn how to add skills to rubrics, click here. Note that if you add skills to an assessment via its "Set skills" tab, then you add skills to the rubric, the original skills are cleared, and the rubric skills are used instead.

Tracking learner mastery

If you associate a course with a set of skills, you can automatically track the progress of each learner on a skill basis. In addition, a learner can see how well they are progressing through the skills in the course.

Mastery grid

If you want to see how well your learners are mastering the skills associated with the course, go to the Mastery section and visit the Learners tab. Here you can see the Mastery grid, which shows mastery levels for all learners in the various skills. In the upper left corner of the cells in the mastery grid is indicated the number of skill measurements that have been gathered from the learner. In the case of skills that have child skills in a competency hierarchy, the total number of measurements from each child is indicated.

If you enable "Mastery threshold for a single measurement" via Mastery/Options, the number of measurements and the threshold is indicated above the mastery grid, and a star is displayed in each cell if the learner has achieved mastery based on this threshold. 

Learners tab

To see how each learner is doing for each skill in a course, visit the Learners tab and look at the Mastery column.

1. Click on a progress wheel to see a detailed overview for a learner.
   
2. To see details about a specific skill, select it from the list, then click Details.

Profile page

You can see the mastery level of the learner via the Mastery tab on the learner's profile page.

Learner view

If it was enabled by the portal administrator via Admin/Policies/General, any learner that is active in a course or has completed a course that has associated skills would see the Mastery widget on their Home dashboard. Learners can see an overview of their mastery level for each skill set in the Mastery widget. Please note that the mastery widget displays mastery values just for the curricula associated with the learner's current courses and those that they completed in the past year.

If they click on a skill set in the mastery widget, they will see the "Mastery dashboard" for that competency set.

On the Mastery dashboard, they will see the summary of the skills.

They can also visit the Details tab for more details about the skills.

Learners can also see an overview of their mastery level for a course on the course landing page. To see their progress on each skill, learners can click on the mastery chart.

If you have enabled learners to see the skills associated with each assessment in a course, then they can click skills within the course to see how their rating was calculated, see parent/child skills, and see a list of which modules/assessments are used to teacher/assess that particular skill. To see the details of a skill, click on its link.

Here you will see the modules and assessments that are tagged with the skills and the rating and average for each item.