Activity completion tracking and Conditional activities/Restrict access

The short slideshow below provides some helpful examples of how the activities covered in this guide can help you to check on students engagement and achievement.

Click here for tracking student progress and engagement in Moodle (workshop slides)

 

Activity Completion tracking

Course completion provides an advanced level of tracking and needs careful consideration and set up before the start of the term. It not only provides useful data on students engagement in the modules but can also provide students with useful learning data too.

If you have turned on completion tracking in your module you will see check (tick) boxes appear against your resources and activities. Those check boxes help you easily track a student’s progress and identify potential areas of concern. Completion Tracking can also provide your students a linear guided progression through the module making it particularly useful for student led learning.

How to enable Completion Tracking

Completion Tracking should be enabled by default on your Moodle site. However, if your site is an old site this feature may not be enabled by default. To enable it;

  1. Go to Administration > Course administration
  2. Edit settings and scroll-down and look for the Completion tracking section
  3. Enable this setting and Save changes.

Please note, after enabling Completion Tracking the tick boxes will only appear on new resources and activities you add to the site. To set existing content up completion tracking;

  1. Click on the Course Management cog icon (top left corner) and then select Edit course completion settings
  2. Most of the settings can be left with their default setting, choose from the following options to enable:
    • Under Condition: Activity completion select every activity you wish to include or alternatively choose to bulk edit to get an overview of all the different content in each section.
  3. Click Save changes.

Enabling students to view their own progress/enabling the course completion block

  1. With editing turned on, you can choose to add the course completion block to the Moodle course homepage, so students (and lecturers) can see their progress.
  2. Click on the Module blocks (see green label in the modules header image)
  4. Click on the Add a block option at the bottom of the blocks
  5. Choose course completion status

What is the difference between the solid and dotted check boxes?

When adding a new resource or activity (with Completion Tracking feature enabled), a solid check box will appear by default to indicate that this is a self or manual student completion. So students would need to tick items themselves to say they are completed.

However, the teacher can change the setting of a resource or activity to automate the completion process and set completion criteria which would result in a dotted check box next to the resource/activity. Moodle automatically checks the box when the student meets the criterion. The criterion might be viewing or receiving a certain score. The completion criteria depends on the type of activity or if it’s a resource.

To change the setting of a resource (e.g. Word document),

  1. Turn editing on > go to the resource > Edit > Edit settings > scroll-down and look for Activity completion
  2. Under Completion tracking drop-down menu, select ‘Show activity as complete when conditions are met’
  3. Check the ‘Require view’ box so student must view this resource to complete it
  4. Please note, the expect completed on date does not display to the students next to the resource
  5. Save and return to course.

To change the setting of an activity (e.g. Quiz),

  1. Turn editing on > go to the activity > Edit > Edit settings > scroll-down and look for Activity completion
  2. Under Completion tracking drop-down menu, select ‘Show activity as complete when conditions are met’
  3. You can choose to
    1. Check the ‘Require view’ box so student must view this resource to complete it
    2. Check the Required grade so student must receive a grade to complete this activity
    3. Check the Require passing grade so that student must pass this activity in order to complete it
    4. Please note, the expect completed on date does not display to the students next to the resource
    5. Save and return to course.

How to run a course completion report?

You can now run a course completion report;

  1. Click on the Course Management cog icon (top left corner) and then select course completion, under user links
  2. You’ll be able to see a list of all the activities and resources that have been tracked and whether a students had met the completion requirements or manually selected the content as complete depending on the settings you set.

 

Restrict Access (Conditional activities) Option

Restrict access is an advanced feature in Moodle and can be used to set students on a specific pathway through the module. Teachers can restrict access to an activity or resource by setting conditions such as dates (e.g. the resource or activity is only available to access on the date you specify), achieving a particular score on another activity (e.g. Quiz, Assignment, Checklist etc.) or a particular resource or activity needs to be completed.

Once the condition(s) have been met, the resource or activity would be available to access. This features can be used to guide student progression through a module.

In the example here, the Turnitin assignment submission is restricted and a condition has been set, hence it is greyed-out. There is a note to advise the students what to do to be able to access the Turnitin assignment. The condition is that students would need to complete the Checklist above in order to access the Turnitin assignment submission.

How to restrict access to a resource or activity?

In each resource or activity setting page, there is a section labelled as “Restrict Access”, where you can set conditions. To access this section,

  1. Turn editing on > go to the activity or recourse
  2. Click Edit and then Edit settings
  3. Scroll-down and look for Restrict Access
  4. Click on Add restriction.. > Select which restriction you would like to add e.g. Date, Grade.

In the example below, there are two conditions set to the Turnitin assignment and students would need to meet those conditions before they are able to access the Turnitin assignment submission. The first condition, the Turnitin assignment is restricted by a date and time. This means students would not be able to access this Turnitin assignment till this date and time and meeting the second condition criterion. The second condition, the students would need to complete an activity called ‘Assignment Checklist’ and achieve 100%. More conditions can be added and you can choose whether to show activity greyed-out with information about the restrictions or hide it entirely until the conditions have been met.