Review item question type

It is possible to include content from other areas of Totara in a performance activity using the Review item question type. Available review item types are Skill, Goals, Learning and Evidence.

How does it work?

The review question supports content from skills, goals, learning and evidence. 

• You can allow participants to add content from skills, goals, learning or evidence for review in a performance activity.

• You can allow participants to give ratings of the skill using scale values. These ratings are stored as part of the performance activity response data.

• You can allow participants to provide a rating based on the scale of the skill or goal and update the rating in the skill or goal.

• Learning and evidence are provided as a reference source of achievement, and cannot be updated from the performance activity. 

Each of these steps will require additional configuration to achieve.

Add content for review only

• You configure the review content type, then add relevant sub-elements to collect information related to the review content.

Add content for review and allow participants to rate the content

• For skills, add the Rating scale: Skill sub-question.

Add content for review and update the rating on the review content

• For skills, enable the Enable Performance activity rating setting, and add the performance activity rating achievement path to the skills. This is required to add the rating sourced from the performance activity to the skill's skill calculation.

• For goals, enable the Ability to change goal status during activity setting. 

Details of these steps can be found on the Configure review item questions page. 

Response required

If you mark your review item question as Response required then the section cannot be submitted by the participants until skills have been selected.

If it is set up as an optional question, the selection of skills is not required to submit the section.

Rating scale

After setting up the review item (as described above) a new sub-question is available called Rating scale: Skill. The rating uses the rating scale of the selected skill. This rating does not impact on the skill, this only generates performance activity response data.

When setting up the rating sub-element, you can optionally tick the box for Include rating scale descriptions if you want to display the associated description for that scale. 

Enable performance activity rating of selected skill 

If this option is selected (as described above) the selected 'rater' participant will be able to select a rating (for each skill added by the participant that selects content), and the rating will be submitted to the skill.

For this rating to be used in the skill's achievement calculation a Site Administrator needs to add the Performance activity review achievement path to the desired skill.

User experience

After the subject instances have been created, users in the relationships configured in the review question will be able to select content from the source skill, goal, learning or evidence to show up in their activity.

Once this is confirmed, participants are able to answer the sub-questions for each item of content selected and complete the activity.

The final skill or goal rating can be given at any time in the activity workflow by participants in the relationship configured in the question settings.

Only a single rating can be submitted to the skill or goal. Where there are many participants in the selected rating role, the first rating will be used in the skill aggregation calculation. This is to prevent the rating from being repeatedly overwritten.