It is possible in Moodle to configure activity completion for any/all course resources or activities which helps tutors to track how students are progressing through a course. As well as providing tutors with useful information, it can help with the student experience – there is a clear visual indication to students of which items in a course they have completed and which items still require attention.
Enable completion tracking in a course
Firstly, completion tracking needs to be enabled for the course.
From the course page, go to the course settings ( > Edit settings). Scroll down the to the Completion tracking section and set ‘Enable completion tracking’ to Yes.
Click Save and display to confirm the change.
Once Completion tracking has been enabled for the course, it will then be possible to track completion against any of the activities/resources in the course.
Tracking completion for an activity/resource
With editing turned on, from the course page, locate the activity/resource for which you wish to track completion and click on Edit > Edit settings to the right of the activity/resource.
Scroll down the settings to find the ‘Activity completion’ section.
Configuring the method of completion
For activity completion there are three methods:
1. “Do not indicate activity completion”
Completion is not be tracked against this activity or resource.
2. “Students can manually mark the activity as completed”
The responsibility is with the student to “tick a box” when they feel they have completed an activity/resource. This can work as a simple checklist for the student who can then tick off items as they go and, on returning to the course, can easily pick up from where they left off in the course (as completed tasks are marked as such).
3. “Show activity as complete when conditions are met”
Moodle will automatically mark the completion for this activity/resource when selected criteria have been met. Options are displayed directly beneath the ‘Activity completion’ drop-down list, allowing you to select the appropriate criteria.
Selecting completion criteria
The available criteria will change depending on the type of activity/resource.
For example:
- a URL resource might be configured so that a student must visit the link;
- a Quiz activity might be configured so that a student must achieve the pass grade;
- a Forum activity might be configured so that a student must create a new discussion of their own (rather than just simply post a reply).
If more than one criterion is selected then all criteria must be met for the activity to be marked as complete.
Expect completed on:
If enabled, this can be used to define a ‘soft’ deadline for when the activity is expected to be completed; it does not prevent the student from completing the activity/resource after this date, but it adds the date to a student’s course calendar and is also listed in an exported ‘Activity completion report’ for manual comparison of the actual completion date vs the expected completion date.
What the student sees
In the course
Once activity completion has been configured in a course, the student will see the course layout as before but to the right of any activities/resources that have been configured for completion tracking, a checkbox will appear.
If the checkbox has a dotted/dashed border then Moodle will automatically mark it as complete once the selected criteria have been met.
If the checkbox has a solid border then the student is expected to click on it themselves to mark the activity/resource as complete.
On the Dashboard
If one or more activities/resources in a course have been configured to track Activity completion, a progress percentage for that course will be displayed against its name on a student’s Dashboard:
As 100% course progress is only achieved on having completed all tracked activities/resources in a course (regardless of whether they can be attempted/accessed by all students, e.g. some activities may only be available to a specific group), it is recommended that completion tracking should only be applied to those activities that can be attempted/accessed by all students in the course in order to avoid any confusion.
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