LMS Progress and Score Weights – Atrixware E-Learning Blog

Leveraging the Progress & Score Weight Settings.

Many would argue that a three question quiz should not carry as much weight as a one hundred question, end-of-course final. By using tools built right into Axis LMS, you can give each of your quizzes and modules a numeric value to determine how much it should advance a user in their course.

In short – you can make your end-of-course exam worth 20% of the entire course; while your short quizzes are worth far less.

In fact, you can go a step further; any content you consider ‘optional’ or ‘practice’ can be added to a course, and carry no weight whatsoever.

This allows your users to take on additional training before confronting the heavily valued finals, without forcing your other user (who don’t need the training) to have their progress hindered.

Using LMS Progress and Score weights efficiently also opens up new capabilities in your Page and Section display rules.

Knowing how much a module will advance a user’s progress lets you coordinate the rest of your course more effectively; hiding and revealing other content as you desire.

Some of the content you add into a course will be more time consuming or fulfilling to the user; others will almost be ‘extra’ content – something that compliments the course well, but isn’t required. Because of this, you can weigh the content you add into a course and, by extension, display a more accurate reflection on the user’s Progress Bars.

To adjust content weights in a course, you’ll first need to go into the course:

Courses > Manage Courses > Manage

Once you’re on the course management page, click on the Progress & Score Weights icon.

There are two tabs in this area: Score Settings and Progress Settings.

Score Settings [above] only applies to graded modules (graded quizzes and offline activities) and will be used to determine the user’s final score for the course. You may, for example, want to assign a higher weight to graded quizzes as compared to offline activities, or assign a higher weight to a particular graded quiz – maybe its the ‘final’ quiz.

Progress Settings [below] apply to every piece of content in the course; each completed item will increase the user’s progress bar by whatever percentage value it is worth.

This percentage value is calculated by your LMS when you assign it a numerical value. And in the example above, each piece of content is given a value between 0 and 2, depending on if we, as admins, care if the user completes the content or not. In our case, we’re really only concerned about Quiz completions – users can practice as they need.

By giving content appropriate score and progress weights, you are able to expand upon the capabilities of your Sections and Subsections. A common practice is to create a section that only displays when a user’s progress is 100% – this section frequently contains a link to their course certificate.