The Personalised Learning Designer allows academics to create basic personalised automation in their course such as displaying a popup message or sending an email. This is most commonly used for writing personalised welcome messages or emails that include the student's name.
What is the Personalised Learning Designer (PLD)?
The Personalised Learning Designer is a page on each course where academics can build 'Rules' that automatically run in the course.
Rules are made up of a combination of 3 main parts which tell Moodle what to do:
- Event: When does the rule happen? (When someone enters a course? At a date?)
- Conditions: Who does the rule affect and when? (Students only? Within a date range?)
- Actions: What does the rule do? (Send an email? Show a popup?)
Academics can use name "tokens" to include the student's name in messages they write.
Getting Started
The Personalised Learning designer can affect many students and should be used with care. Some important considerations when using the Personalised Learning Designer are:
- What is the goal and is it important enough to send a PLD message? Too many rules can be distracting.
- How should messages be worded? Some wording can result in confusion when sent as a popup.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide
Adding Rules to PLD
Academics can add rules to the Personalised Learning Designer page in their course to create automation. Rules are made up of building blocks known as Events, Conditions, and Actions.
Whilst multiple events, conditions, and actions are possible, we encourage users to only use one event per rule to keep rules easy to manage. Multiple conditions and actions are fine.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide
Templates
It is recommended to get started with using or modifying one of our basic templates for building Personalised Learning Designer rules as they cover the main scenarios.
Course Introduction
You may want to add a course introduction for students who first join your course. When your students first access the course, they will be redirected to view the course outline and optionally a welcome email or popup can be sent.
The following guide is an example approach for adding a course introduction rule.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide
Basic Scheduled Email
You may want students to receive an email at a specified time in your course. PLD can be used to send out a generic reminder or critical information to students via email.
Click 'Get Started' to view the step-by-step guide
The Display alert and send email action will display a pop-up or email a message to triggering participants. Tokens such as student first name and last name may be included in the messages, these will display the student's name within the message. If sending an email, set the 'from' dropdown to custom and enter the sender email (receivers will reply to this). For 'Recipients'. click 'Add recipient' and select 'Triggering user'. Write the message contents, 'Insert token' may be clicked to include personalised information. The placeholder text added by the token will be replaced with the personalized information. While User and Course tokens are generally available, the other tokens may not provide information if not set up with activity specific events.
How do I include student names in PLD?
Tokens can be used in the Personalized Learning Designer to include student-specific information such as names in emails and alerts.
1. When setting up a PLD rule, go to the 'Actions' tab
2. Add a 'Send email' or 'Display Alert' event
3. Click 'Insert token' beside a text area and select a token
Tokens are a specific piece of text and can be copy-pasted/moved anywhere within the text editor.
It is recommended to mainly use the User and course tokens as the activity/grade tokens will only work if an activity/grade-specific event is used.
How to see PLD history?
The 'History' tab in the Personalized Learning Designer allows staff to view a history of all the PLD rules that ran in the course.
1. In the course, go to the 'More' at the top of the course and click 'Personalized Learning Designer'
2. Select the 'History' tab on the top
Staff can highlight the contents of the table and copy-paste it directly into Excel to use more advanced filters. The dropdown towards the top of the table can be set to 'All' to display history on one page.
What are different actions and conditions available in PLD?
The 'Add user to group' action, adds the triggering users to a group. If used alongside a specific date event, a condition should be included to specify the triggering users.
The 'Course login' condition limits the rule to only run for participants who have/haven't logged into the course within a time frame before the event is triggered.
The 'User role check' condition is used to limit the rule to only run for specific roles. This is most commonly used to limit rules to only run on students.
The 'Recurring event' or 'Specific date and time' events trigger the rule whenever a recurring or specific date is reached. In Moodle this is limited to happen every 15 minutes, so something set to 12:10 will only run once 12:15 is reached. Similarly, the 'Date check' can also be used as an extra condition to have other events only run on certain dates.
The 'Activity viewed' event triggers the rule whenever someone views a specific activity or type of activity in the course. If all activities of a type in course should trigger the rule, select 'Any of type'.
Does PLD send emails to students with an inactive status (i.e., unenrolled from course)?
By default, Personalised Learning Designer (PLD) will not send emails to students who have an inactive status in the participants list which means they have unenrolled from the course.
If in doubt, it is recommended to check and ensure the "Exclude users with suspended status from this communication" is ticked within the PLD rule's "Send email" action. The words “suspended status” in this setting means the same as "inactive status". This is the setting that prevents PLD from sending emails to students who have left the course.
Be careful when viewing the history tab as students with inactive status who have left the course will still appear in the history even when an email is not sent.