• In Competencies you can view, edit, and create competency structures. 
• Competency structures are formed by organizing competencies, learning objectives, and activities into a hierarchy. Competencies occupy the highest levels of these hierarchies. They represent general knowledge, skills, and abilities that learners can acquire. 
• Learning objectives occupy middle positions in competency structures. They represent specific knowledge, skills and abilities that a learner must acquire, in order to gain a competency. 
• Activities occupy the lowest level of competency structures. These include quizzes, surveys, assignments, discussions, and more. Activities are the only elements that can be assessed in a competency structure, and they provide a basis for determining when a learner has achieved parent learning objectives. 

Use competencies to track the general knowledge, skills, and abilities learners acquire as they participate in courses.   

To create a competency:

• Go the the Course Admin tab on your couse navigation bar, go to the heading Assessment and select Competencies.
• Click New and and select Competency  
• Enter a name for your competency. It is a good practice to choose a name that clearly identifies the knowledge, skills, or abilities that the competency represents.  
• Status controls what can be done with the created competency.  Status controls can be used to implement a workflow and revision control process for drafting, reviewing, approving and archiving competencies.  
• When set to Draft or In Review a competency’s parent-child associations can be changed, but the competency will not be visible to learners, and they will not have the ability to complete the competency.  
• Only approved competencies can be completed by learners, so when you have finished creating a competency structure and you are ready to use it to track learner progress you will need to change its status to Approved.  
• You can add an additional identifier if, for example, a professional or academic standard corresponds to the competency.  
• Allow learners to monitor their own progress towards completion by enabling Make Competency and its Children Visible to Users.  
• Moreover, check Allow Re-evaluation of users who have achieved this competency to enable the system to automatically re-evaluate user achievements when changes to the competency structure are made.  
• When you’re done configuring the competency click Save.  
• The created competency is now ready to be incorporated in competency structures.  

Competency structures are used to track information about the knowledge, skills and abilities learners acquire.  You can use them to help access learning outcomes and formalize course and program requirements for accreditation.

To track a learner’s achievement of a competency:

• In the competency tool, you can create, edit, and track the achievement of competencies. 
• When a competency structure with activities/assessments is approved, the evaluation system will automatically track the achievement of learning objectives and competencies as learners work through activities. 
• Uncompleted assessments/activities typically start with the Not Assessed status. 
• A learner receives the Achieved status when they complete the activity, and their performance exceeds a specified threshold; a learner receives the Not Achieved status when they have completed the activity, but their performance falls short of the threshold. 
• A learning objective is automatically achieved when all its associated assessments are achieved; a competency is automatically achieved when all its associated assessments are achieved.  

• Within the Competencies tool, you can see which elements of a structure learners have achieved. To do so:
  • Browse to the structure element of interest and select it. 
  • Click Results. On the Results page, you can see whether learners have achieved the structure element. 
  • Browse to the structure element of interest and select it. 
  • Click Results. 
  • On the Results page, you can see whether learners have achieved the structure element. 

• It is also possible for you to track learning objective completion using the Class Progress tool. Depending on its configuration, the Class Progress view within the Class Progress tool may include the Objective Completion Summary indicator. 
• If it does, information about visible learning objectives with assessable activities will be displayed in the Objectives category. Within a particular user’s progress report, if the Objectives Progress indicator is displayed, it will include detailed information about the learner’s progress towards learning objective completion and achievement. 
• Learners can similarly track their own progress by viewing their own user progress report.