Keywords: completion, tick, checkbox, complete, activity, report, progress, activities, resources

What is it?

Activity completion allows tutors to set completion criteria for a resource or activity. A check (tick) appears against the activity when the student meets this criterion. The criterion might be viewing, receiving a certain score or a student marking it as complete manually.

Restrict access can be used with activity completion to hide items on a course page until others are completed.

Why use it?

Students can see the tasks that they have completed or engaged with and those that are remain. Tutors can also view this information for each student via the Activity completion report.

Who can use it?

Tutors and course administrators can set activity completion on a Moodle course and any of its activities and resources.

As students complete activities these will be marked as complete automatically and some may be manually ticked as complete by students.

Before I start...

Decide which activities you would like to be marked as complete for each student and how you would like this to happen: either when viewed, completed, or manually.

Meeting the baseline

The UCL Connected Learning Baseline suggests the following for Structure:

• 1.6 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 it up?

Step 1: Turn on activity completion for your Moodle course

1. Login to Moodle with your UCL username and password at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/moodle
2. Navigate to your Moodle course 
3. Click on Administration block > Course Administration > Edit Settings
4. Scroll down to the Completion Tracking section and ensure Enable Completion tracking is set to Yes
5. Click Save changes Once you have followed these steps, and returned to your course, to the right of any resource or activity on your course, you will see some unchecked boxes to the right of the course elements. This indicates that you can use conditional release on these items.

Step 2: Enable activity completion

Activity completion can be turned on for an individual resource or activity as explained in process a. Alternatively, it can be enabled in bulk as explained in process b below.

Option a) Enable activity completion for individual resources or activities

Once you have done this, you now have to ensure all of the items you want to apply restrictions to have the correct Activity completion settings

1. In the top right hand corner of your course, Turn editing on.
2. Select the resource you would like to apply the activity completion to, and from the Edit drop down, click on the Edit settings.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the Activity completion:

Here, you can select how you would like your students to indicate that they have completed this activity. You have three options:

• Do not indicate activity completion
• Students can manually mark the activity as completed
• Show activity as complete when conditions are met.

Select from the second or third option, depending on how you would like your students to indicate that they have completed the activity. The conditions might be something simple like 'Require view' for a document, or a certain grade for an assessed element. You can also choose a date when you expect the activity to be completed; leave this blank if you do not have a clear date in mind.

Option b) Enable activity completion in bulk

1. On a Moodle course, under the Administration Block, click Course completion.
2. Click the tab near the top of the page titled Bulk edit activity completion.
3. Select the activities you want to edit. Note. if you select different types of activities, e.g. a Forum and a Page and a Media Resource, you can only edit the basic completion tracking settings. For more specific completion tracking requirements, select only that activity type to see the full range of options for that activity type, e.g. if you select all the Forums on your course, you can change the activity completion to require students to make at least 2 posts and at least 2 replies. 
4. Click edit.
5. Change the completion tracking settings are required.
6. Click Save changes.

Option c) Set the Default activity completion in bulk

Once enabled, the default activity completion tracking will be manual i.e. students have the option to mark the activity or resource as completed.

A course administrator or tutor can change the default activity completion, which will set the default settings for any subsequent activities or resources added to the course.

Similar to option b.

1. On a Moodle course, under the Administration Block, click Course completion.
2. Click the tab near the top of the page titled Default activity completion.
3. Select the activities you want to edit. Note. if you select different types of activities, e.g. a Forum and a Page and a Media Resource, you can only edit the basic completion tracking settings. For more specific completion tracking requirements, select only that activity type to see the full range of options for that activity type, e.g. if you select all the Forums on your course, you can change the activity completion to require students to make at least 2 posts and at least 2 replies. 
4. Click edit.
5. Change the completion tracking settings are required.
6. Click Save changes.

View the Activity report

You can access this via your Moodle space Administration block > Course Administration > Reports > Activity completion

It displays an at-a glance grid showing which students have completed the activities or resources for which you have enabled activity completion. You can filter the report by student and by group (if you've set up any groups).

Caution

Since students may not have read a resource completely when they first access it, it is useful to set these to be marked as complete manually by students (they tick a checkbox), so they can indicate themselves when they have read the resource, rather than relying on the fact they clicked on the resource to automatically indicate completion.

Examples and case studies

You might use activity completion on a quiz along with restrict access to show a label highlighting the quiz has yet to be completed to the student and have this disappear once they've completed the quiz.

Questions & Answers

Activity completion FAQs are available on moodledocs.

Further information

See: conditional release for how to hide and show activities based on whether they have been completed.

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