How to enable conditional activities

This refers to Moodle 4.3 from August 2024 onwards

How to enable conditional activities

Completion Tracking allows teachers to specify conditions that define when an activity is considered to be complete e.g. when a certain number of posts have been made, or a grade has been reached or a choice has been made .

You set, for each activity or resource, what constitutes "completion".

For a resource, completion will be equivalent to "view" - this only really checks whether the student has opened the resource, it can't know if they've actually looked at it!
See below for a list of what can constitute completion for activities.

Note: Completion tracking must be turned on BEFORE the conditional  resources  or activities are added.

How to turn on completion tracking 

1. Navigate to the Moodle module you want to work in.
2. Under the module title, click on the Settings tab.
3. 
4. Scroll down to the section entitled 'Completion tracking' and from the 'Enable completion tracking' drop-down menu select  'Yes'.
5. 
6. Click on the 'Save and display' button.

To set up activity/resource completion tracking criteria:

1. Set up the FIRST resource or activity.
2. Navigate to your module and click on the 'Turn editing on' toggle (top right).
3. Click on the + Add an activity or resource button as usual. 
4. Add the resource or activity you want, e.g., Select a File resource and upload. (e.g., Preliminary Material)

       5. Complete the settings.

       6. Under the heading Activity completion

            a. From the 'Completion tracking' drop-down menu choose 'Show activity as complete when conditions are met'.
               For a resource: click the box for 'Student must view this activity to complete it' as the condition (this is the only possible option).

b. For an activity: Set the conditions for completion (completion criteria options can change for different activities), e.g., For a quiz activity you can click Require grade: "Student must receive a grade to complete this activity". You can also state if it is to be a passing grade (which needs to be add to quiz settings) or if a number of attempts can be made.

c. (For a forum)  for example, Require reposts: "Student must post discussions or replies: [enter number e.g., 2]" 
or must post or reply to one or more discussions (first post in a discussion) or a combination of the two.  Again there are more activity completion criteria to chose from.
For example:

Note: "Expect completed on" is a date which is not show to students on the module page and is only displayed in the Activity completion report for teacher use - a sort of reminder to yourself.  When the date is coming up, the activity will appear in the Timeline block on the dashboard to remind students that there is an activity/resource that requires action.

7. Click on the 'Save and return to module' button.

8. Click on the 'Turn editing off' toggle in the top right of the main Moodle page.

List of possible Completion Requirement Options for Activities (or resources)

Set up the conditional resource or activity

1. Click on the 'Turn editing on' toggle on your Moodle page
2. Click on the +Add activity or resource hyperlink as usual to add the second resource or activity
3. Under the 'Restrict access' section heading, click on the 'Add restriction...' button

      4. An 'Add restriction...' pop-up window will open. Click on the 'Activity completion' button.

5. From the Activity completion drop-down menu select the previous activity that will become a part of the 'condition' (e.g., Preliminary Material)

6. From the additional drop-down menu select 'must be marked complete'

Now the student must complete the first activity (e.g., read/open the PowerPoint Preliminary Material) before the second one is viewable.

Note: Access can also be restricted conditional upon achieving (or not achieving) a grade in an assignment or other graded activity.

Restrict access can be applied to an individual activity or to a whole module section.  If you want to stage the release of every module section you will need to restrict access to each module section individually based on completion of an activity in the previous one.

Self or manual student completion

It's also possible to allow students to manually mark an activity as completed (but that relies on their honesty - you can compare it with their basic tracking report!). Where the resource is a label, the only way to indicate completion is for the student to manually click 'Mark as done'.

To allow student manual completion

When setting up the activity or resource, in the Activity completion section of the settings page, choose from 'Completion tracking' drop-down menu 'Students can manually mark this activity as completed'

NOTE: Where you have a lot of material for students to work through, students often like to be able to tick boxes themselves to track their progress through the module.

Results of Activity Completion 

For activities requiring students to manually mark an activity as completed, a 'Mark as done' button is shown on the activity page.

To mark this activity complete, the students will need to click on the checkbox and the status will change to 'Done'.

If activities or resources are set to 'Show activity as completed when conditions are met' and 'Student must view this activity to complete it' is selected, then students will see a checkbox 'To do: View' . When the student has clicked on the activity/resources the checkbox will change status to 'Done: View'.

Activity Completion Reports

You can view a report table with a list of your students and their completion results.

To view the Completion Reports page:

1. On your module front page click on the 'Reports' tab under the module title and 'More'

2. Under Reports click on Activity completion

This will show a table of your students and their progress.

You can:

• Search the table by the first letter of "First name" and/or "Surname"

• Export the results to a spreadsheet by clicking on the Download hyperlinks underneath the table.

Changing Activity Completion Settings

These settings can be changed later by selecting the 'Edit settings' option for a resource or activity.

However if one or more students have already completed a resource of activity, you will see a warning in the Settings page:

You can unlock the setting by clicking on the 'Unlock completion options' button, but student progress information up to that point will be lost for that activity or resource.

Copying activities with completion tracking set

If an activity in which completion tracking is set is copied into another module (e.g., copying one form last year into this year's module), then that module must have completion tracking turned on.

Tracking cannot be added retrospectively.

Typical use example

To ask students to complete a Plagiarism test or statement (using a Choice) before they are able to see the assignment and make a submission.

Similar tutorials

The following other resources are also relevant to this topic:

• How to use completion tracking to monitor student progress

• Magic with Moodle 18 - Monitoring students & completion tracking