Using Course completion

Ways of using course completion

Please note that the course completion status of learners is updated in 2 different ways:

1. If an activity or criteria is marked complete manually, e.g. by an instructor or manager, the status is updated immediately.
2. If an activity or criteria is met automatically, e.g. passing/completing a quiz, then the status is updated the next time LMS’s Cron runs.

Course completion can be used in many ways. It is important to remember that this feature is only a reporting feature.

While course completion will not lock a user out of another course, it will allow an instructor to see if a user has completed the recommended prerequisite courses.

It can also work with Activity completion to show users the activities they have completed. This can be via a check mark next to the activity on the course’s home page, or by looking at the Course completion status block.

It is a way to ensure that the teaching team’s members sign off that a user has completed the course. For example, Teacher B is the instructor for Course2, which has a recommended prerequisite for completing Course1. Teacher B, is the non-editing teacher in Course1 and must check the box that indicates the user has completed the course.

In Example 1 image, the instructor has not checked off that “Test User1” has finished this course.

Courses can be linked via their course completion criterion.

Manual completions

Depending upon the settings, course completion can require that an activity or the entire course be manually marked as complete. The settings will allow any number of combinations. For example, an activity might require the user to receive a minimum score and have the non-editing instructor manually check complete. Or merely require the user to check an activity or the course as complete.

Manual marking by user examples

A course completion setting may require the user to confirm they have completed the course. Users do this by using the Self-completion block

A course completion setting may require a user to manually mark an activity when they believe they have finished it.
On the course homepage, the user may see a box to check as a self-completion of the activity. See Example 1 above.

Manual marking by instructor examples

In order for a teacher (or non editing teacher, manager or other role) to mark a course as complete, the appropriate box in the Manual Completion by.. section must be checked in the completion tracking settings.

The instructor then accesses the Course completion status block and checks the names of the users who are deemed to have completed the course.

Course completion based on specified criteria

It is possible to have a course marked as completely dependent on a combination of specified criteria such as activities completed, grade achieved or length of time spent in the course. This is decided in the overall criteria type aggregation.

The settings for automatic course completion are described in more detail in Course completion settings and these include:

• activities completed
• date
• duration after enrollment
• grade
• unenrollment

See Example 1, Example 2 and Example 4.

Course completion report

Course completion info can be viewed by managers, teachers and non-editing teachers (and any other users with the capability report/completion:view) in Administration> Course administration > Course completion or via a link in the Course completion status block.

See also

• Course completion status block
• Self-completion block