Pulse

About

Pulse provides teachers with a powerful tool to create personalized, adaptive learning experiences. Use notifications and reminders to (re)engage students and nudge them to complete their courses. No matter if you need better tools to monitor and improve the ratio of completed courses for compliance reasons, or if you want to increase and maintain a high level of user engagement, Pulse is there for you. 

Keep teachers, parents (respectively line managers) up to date about progress of their children (direct reports) and enable them to take action when needed. With Pulse, teachers finally have a way to involve people related to the learner. At the same time, Pulse saves a lot of time because it works in a fully automated way, allowing teachers to focus on what actually matters: teaching. The Pulse framework is built in a modular way and thus new conditions and new actions can be added easily.  

Use Cases

• Course welcome messages
• Announcement of an upcoming activity
• Congratulations messages
• Reminder for overdue activities
• Awarding credits for achievements
• Approval workflows
• Implement gamification strategies
• and many more….!

What’s new in Pulse 2.0?

Pulse Pro 2.0 introduces a powerful automation engine. Automation templates can be managed globally by users with appropriate capabilities. Based on these templates, automation instances are built upon automation templates, kept in sync with the automation template, with the option to override specific settings per instance. Automation conditions trigger the automation and rely on events and/or completion. Built in a modular way. Initially, there are conditions for activity completion, course completion, enrolments, session booking (mod_facetoface) and cohort membership. Automation actions are outcome of the automation, i.e. what’s actually happening. Built in a modular way. In the initial scope, this will be notifications. The first action we’ve built is a very flexible and powerful notification action.

Check it out on bdecent.io or read through the extensive documentation.

Good to know: All features of Pulse Pro 1.3 are still available in Pulse Pro 2.0, but should be considered legacy features. They are safe to use, and we will continue to maintain them, but we strongly recommend to implement notifications using the new automation engine. If you want to use Pulse Pro on Moodle Workplace or Totara, please contact us.

Pulse is a Moodle activity and can be added to courses like any other activity (e.g. page or quiz). Teachers can use Pulse for (1) notifications and (2) completion workflows.

Key features of Pulse 1.x

Notifications

Each Pulse activity can be configured to send a notification once it becomes available to the student. There are a number of placeholders that can be used to personalize the message, like the first name of the student or the name of the course. The notification can be sent to the student, the teacher, the non-editing teacher or the manager. Other course context or user context roles are supported as well, e.g. parent or staff manager.

Using availability restrictions, teachers can specify in a very flexible and powerful way, when the notification is sent, e.g.:

• upon enrolling into the course as course welcome message
• after joining a group as group welcome message
• at a specific date as reminder for an upcoming activity
• after completing a specific activity as congratulations message
• after a specific date AND only for students that have *not* completed an activity as reminder for an overdue activity
• for students that received a very good/very bad grade in a quiz as warning message to parents
• and many more….!

In addition to the notification sent to the student, the same — or another — text can be shown on the course page. (similar to the label module)

Completion workflows

Pulse supports activity completion in three ways (in addition to moodle core ones): upon availability, when marked complete by student and when approved by other role.

Complete when available

This activity completion criterium is very powerful when used in combination with availability restrictions. One key issue this solves is that course completion is a bit limited when it comes to activity completion — you can either require all or any; with Pulse, you can build flexible scenarios easily, for example:

1. multilingual content where the student can choose which one to complete
2. multiple learning paths, depending on student choice, progress or grades
3. section completion
4. and many more….!

Complete when marked complete by student

The key difference to core’s manual completion is that it is non-reversible. Once the student has marked the activity as complete, the student cannot revoke it any more. This is important for a number of scenarios like:

1. Gathering consent before the course can be started (e.g. for privacy reasons)
2. Asking the student to choose a learning path
3. Legal requirements where students need to read and confirm something, as disclaimer
4. For offline/real life activities that shall be represented in the course in a very simple and efficient way
5. As checklist for the student.

Complete when marked complete by others

This completion criterium can be used to either get approval by course or user context roles, for example the teacher of the course, the parent of the child or the line manager of the course. Teachers/parents/managers can give their approval in a very simple and intuitive way, much easier than any other interface moodle core provides.

Pulse supports groups (non-editing teachers only see students in their group) and user context roles (e.g. parents can only see their children, line managers can only see their employees).