Kineo has recently made available a new 360 appraisal module for Moodle, the leading open-source learning management system.

This module was developed with the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) and is being shared as part of the commitment to promote an ‘open source’ culture of sharing, reuse and collaborative development across Government and its suppliers.

This new plug-in module allows organisations to run 360 appraisals directly within Moodle and can be downloaded here.

• custom definition of competences and ratings scale
• self appraisal against competencies
• a range of reviewers to be included such as managers, peers, staff, customers (internal and external users)
• automatic emailing and online completion of review
• full reporting on desired ratings by competency and actual ratings
• anonymous reporting
• filtering by reviewer type
• spider diagram summaries highlighting strengths and weaknesses

Module functionality

The module is an activity which can be added to any course area in Moodle or Totara, the custom distribution of Moodle, for the corporate sector.

The module allows organisations to create a competency structure that learners will be reviewed against. This can contain different levels such as a competency with sub-competency levels or with skills. The grading scale against the competences can also be customised. Below is an example screenshot of a competency framework.

Once the competency structure has been created a user can undertake a self-assessment. Below is an example screenshot.

The user can then invite a defined number of people to also rate them against the competency framework. The respondents can be grouped into different types such as manager, colleagues, customers, etc. Below is a sample screen showing how the user can select respondents.

The respondents then automatically receive an email with a link to the assessment form which they can complete. The user can see who has responded and send email reminders from within the system to people as necessary.

When the responses have been received the user, and others as defined such as their manager, can view the responses. These are displayed in different forms. The first is a simple analysis table as shown below.

This shows the user’s self-rating for each competency or sub-competency/skill area and the average from other groups such as colleagues or customers. It also shows the overall average. The feedback can also be shown in a spiderweb diagram form as shown below.

The spiderweb approach allows a user to visually see very quickly where there are differences or perceived weaknesses. The competences and skill areas are displayed around the web and the details are displayed when the user rolls over the result area as shown below.

Further customisation can also allow the user to then decide on the basis of the results which areas they want to work on and carry these through to their training plan or to their e-portfolio, we have done integrations at Kineo with Mahara, the leading e-portfolio tool for Moodle.

Kineo and HCA are very pleased to be able to support the Moodle community by donating the source code for the 360 module to the community under General Public License (GPL), available to download here. Kineo can also provide support for the plug-in – contact us for more details.