Best Practices: Creating a Moodle Course To-Do List

Best Practices: Creating a Moodle Course To-Do List 
By: Rebecca DeSantis, MSIT, Moodlerooms Instructional Designer

Did you know that in Moodle you can create a course To-Do List for your students and customize how they experience a course based on conditions? You may have noticed some completion tracking options when adding resources and activities into courses, but perhaps you’ve just glossed over them. It is also quite possible that you’ve never enabled activity completion in your course settings, and you don’t even know it exists! In today’s post, I’m going to explain how you can start using the completion tracking features and how it can be powerful when used with restricted access.

Tracking activity completion

Activity completion allows students to track their progress visually as they complete activities and resources in the course. As students complete items, they can mark them as complete or Moodle will mark is as complete based on conditions that you set. If you want to use activity completion, you’ll need to enable “Completion tracking” in your course settings. As a best practice, enable this before you start building out your course content so that you can set activity completion settings when first creating resources and activities. This will save you from having to go back and editing each item later.

When you view the settings for resources and activities, you will see activity completion options. Set the completion tracking method and select any of the conditions that you would like to use for each. Be consistent with the tracking method you choose to use. The available conditions will vary depending on the type of resource or activity.

Restricting access based on completion conditions 

Conditional access allows you to release content based on certain conditions (e.g., date, grade, completion status). In order to restrict access, the criteria must be set in the restrict access settings within a resource and activity. The restrict access settings are located directly above the activity completion settings. Your site administrator must enable this feature at the site level in order to use it.

To set the conditional access based on activity completion, set the completion conditions. If you do not see an activity listed when trying to configure the conditions, the activity completion settings have not been set yet for it. You can easily go back and modify these as needed. You might want to consider setting restrict access conditions at the end of the course building process as this can get complicated, depending on your design.

Course completion tracking

You will see a “Completion tracking” link within the course administration area after enabling completion tracking in your course. The completion tracking feature allows you to set what must be done in order for a course to be considered complete. As a best practice, set up all of your activities and resources (with activity completion) before you configure this area. Then, before your course goes live, delete all user completion data and set all course completion settings. Once a course is live and tracking begins, you can NOT alter this information without removing all completion data. So, be sure to set it up correctly before students begin the course!

Course completion status block
You can use this block in conjunction with the course completion tracking feature to see how students are progressing in a course. It also serves as a course To-Do List for students. They can view the set criteria for the course, along with the requirements, completion status, and date of completion for each item. This block can be added at the end of the course building process, as it is not needed to set up any completion conditions.

Summary

In order for you to make the most use of the completion tracking features in Moodle, make sure you:

1. Enable completion tracking in the course.
2. Set activity completion requirements for activities and resources as you build them.
3. Set conditional access for activities as desired.
4. Set the course completion tracking settings when you are finished building the course.
5. Add the Course completion status block to the course to track progress.

You can learn more about these features and other activities in our Course Building Fundamentals  online course.

Thanks for reading, 

~ Rebecca