M29 - Course completion

Keywords: progress, ticks, completion, completed, activity, task, list, report

What is it?

Course completion allows a tutor to choose which activities in a Moodle course must be completed by students.

As students complete these activities, students (and tutors) can see their progress in the course completion block, once this is added to the Moodle course home page.

Why use it?

It allows students to view their progress through activities on a Moodle course.

Who can use it?

• Staff can set this up and view reports of how students are progressing.
• Students can view their progress from the course completion block on the Moodle course homepage.

Before I start...

Make sure you enable course completion in the course settings:

• Go to the Settings tab in the top Course menu.
• Scroll down to Completion Tracking, expand and choose Yes in the Enable completion tracking drop-down menu.
• Then click Save and display.

You must then enable activity completion in the course completion settings for each resource/activity you want to include as part of the completion requirements.

Meeting the baseline

The  UCL Connected Learning Baseline  suggests the following for Structure :

• 1.5 Guide students as to which task to complete next. This may include appropriate use of conditional release, so tasks are hidden until prerequisite tasks are completed, or until a certain date.

The  Orientation category suggests that you:

• 2.2 Explain participation requirements:
  • Identify which activities are compulsory and optional.

• 2.7 Students are sent a welcome message before the start of the module. Using the Moodle News forum ensures all students get an email. Include:

  • A short overview of the course; 
  • A summary of expectations for online engagement;
  • How they can gain access to their course;
  • Explain the introductory activities to be completed and by when (e.g. posting to an introductions forum);
  • Link to the UCL online learning orientation Moodle course (for wholly online courses). 

How do I set one up?

1. Once course completion is enabled (see above), go to the top course menu on your Moodle course homepage and click More > Course completion.
2. While most settings can be left with their default value, select the following options that you would like to enable:
   • Under Condition: Activity completion select every activity to include as part of the completion status.
   • Under Condition: Manual completion by others: select Tutor and Course Administrator to enable staff to mark activities as complete on behalf of a student.
3. Click Save changes.
4. With editing turned on, add the course completion block to the Moodle course homepage, so students (and their tutors) can see their progress.

Caution

By default, enabling course completion will display the dates, times and completion requirements for any activities a student can manually mark. If you do not want to display this information to them, ensure  Show activity completion conditions is set to No under Completion tracking in your course Settings.

If you want students to mark offline activities as complete, these could be added as text and media areas in a Moodle topic, with a checkbox that students can manually tick off when complete.

Examples and case studies

- None at this time

Questions & Answers

Q. How do I allow students to mark their progress as complete?

A. You can do this at two levels. For each activity you can allow students to mark an activity as complete manually - this is good for readings and other activities where it is difficult to automatically mark the activity as complete.

You can also allow students to manually mark any activities as complete (even if they fail to submit an assignment, or complete a quiz for example) by enabling the Condition: Manual self completion setting. To access this, go to the top course menu on your Moodle course homepage and click More > Course completion.

Further information

• Guidance on the Self completion block is available from Moodle Docs.