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Activity completion

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Moodle 2.0

Activity completion is a new feature in Moodle 2.0 and is found under the advanced settings of most activities. This feature allows the teacher to make student entry into the activity conditional upon meeting standards of completion by another activity.

For example, a teacher will set a Quiz to be dependent upon the student completing a specific Lesson or Assignment activity.

Note: When it was under development activity completion was called Conditional activities and there were contributed modules in pre 2.0 Moodles called Activity locking.


Activity completion in Moodle 2.0 video:

<mediaplayer>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6vjgfMae8U</mediaplayer>

Enabling activity completion

To use activity completion, the following settings must be enabled:

  • By an administrator by checking the "Enable completion tracking" and "Enable conditional availability" checkboxes in Site Administration > Advanced features.
  • By an administrator/instructor by selecting "Enabled, control via completion and activity settings" option in drop-down box for "Completion tracking" under "Student progress" area in the "Course administration" > "Edit settings" page.

After the above settings are enabled, an Activity completion section will appear for teachers on the edit activity page.

Essentially this asks the teacher what is necessary for this activity to be considered complete. It is found in the activity setting's "Activity completion" This condition can then be checked in the restrict condition area in another activity setting (see restrict availability condition above).

Require view

When this option is turned on, students have to view the activity in order to complete it.

  • In most cases, clicking the link is enough to 'view' the activity.
  • You should usually not turn on the 'view' condition if you have other requirements - this makes extra work for the server and it's unlikely that a student could meet any other conditions without viewing the activity.

Require grade

When this option is turned on, students have to get a grade on the activity in order to complete it. For example, a quiz would be marked completed as soon as the user submits it.

It does not matter how well the student did. Getting any grade will mark the activity completed.

It is possible to distinguish between 'pass' and 'fail' grades so that the activity becomes 'completed, passed' or 'completed, not passed' instead of just 'completed'. These results show a different icon and alternative text.

To set this up, you need to specify the pass value for this activity's individual grade:

  1. Go to the course gradebook by clicking the 'Grades' link on the course administration block.
  2. From the 'Choose an action' dropdown, pick 'Categories and items'.
  3. Click the Edit icon next to the grade item for this activity.
  4. Turn on 'Show Advanced'.
  5. Type a grade value (e.g. 5.0) in the 'Grade to pass' box.

Once you have done this, anybody submitting the quiz will receive either the pass or fail completion icon. If the quiz can be taken multiple times, the completion icon will automatically update whenever the grade does.

There is one limitation: this only works if grades are immediately visible to students. The grade must be neither permanently hidden, nor hidden until a certain date. If a grade is hidden then only the standard 'completed' state will be displayed - even once the hidden date has passed.

Locked completion options

If at least one person has completed an activity, completion options are 'locked'. This is because changing these options may result in unexpected behaviour.

If somebody has ticked an activity as manually completed, and you then set it to automatic completion, the activity will become unticked - very confusing for the student who had already ticked it!

It is best not to unlock options unless you are sure it won't cause problems - for example, if you know that students don't have access to the course yet, so it will only be staff who have marked the activity completed when testing.

What happens when you unlock

Once you unlock options and then click 'Save changes', all completion information for the activity will be deleted and, if possible, regenerated according to the new settings.

  • If the new completion option is manual, everyone will be set to 'not completed' regardless of any previous setting.
  • If it is automatic then, depending on the options chosen, the system may or may not be able to construct a correct current value for everyone.
    • The 'viewed' requirement will not work - even if a student has viewed the activity before, it will not be marked completed until they view it again.
    • Most other options will be recalculated successfully.

If you change completion options while a student is logged in, they may not see the changes for some minutes.

See also