Best Of

Hi everyone
We are watching this from Aarhus University, DK, and I just want to say: you are not alone!
We turned Enhanced Table of Contents on in our environment at the start of this semester, despite having alot of worry:

• Student wellbeing - telling learners a piece of material is "complete" gives them a false picture of their learning progress and where to focus their attention, and we fear a harmful one. We asked, and our student panel shares this fear.
• Instructors pedagogical choice - the indicator passes judgement on whether material is "done" without ever stating what "done" means. It is a judgement a lot of our teachers never wanted to make, and we have already had several complaints on exactly this point.
• Administration of data - we are not comfortable collecting and displaying completion data by default when nobody asked for it and instructors see no purpose in it. We worried this sits in a GDPR grey zone.

All this is a real shame, because completion progress indication comes bundled in with a lot of good stuff. Most of the Enhanced Table of Contents is a genuine improvement. But completion is not really a navigation feature - it is a layer that comments on the content. Showing where you are in a course, and passing judgement on whether a student is done with it, are two very different jobs. We would like the first without being forced into the second.

We flagged this to D2L back in May, and even built and tested a browser extension to hide the indicators in the TOC. In the end we turned ETOC on anyway, because we had no clean way to keep it off. We have fallen back on a large communication effort to walk instructors through minimising or hiding it, which is not obvious to do. In our setup instructors do not have the permission to turn NCE on and off, and even if they could, I do not believe the workaround in this thread will survive the September release.

So the fact that we went this far says a lot: the control we need is not there.

Brightspace has always been a platform that lets us run our own pedagogy and decide how we teach and how we meet our students. The way completion progress indication has been implemented challenges that.

We are putting together a couple of PIEs to ask for actual fixes, and I will follow up here with the links once they are live, so if you agree with any of this, you will have somewhere to add your vote ;)

Hi @Jaymi.W.61

Thanks for reaching out.

The Enhanced Table of Contents will become the only Table of Contents view beginning with the September 2026 release. As a result, there is no longer a configuration option to disable the Enhanced Table of Contents or to hide only the learner completion progress indicators. The previous configuration variabled2l.Tools.Content.EnableLessonsEnhancedTOCis being removed as part of this change. The Enhanced Table of Contents, including its topic and module progress indicators, will therefore be enabled automatically.

The completion method can be managed using the following configuration variable:d2l.Tools.Content.ContentCompletionType

Changing this variable to Required:Manual allows learners to select Mark as Complete themselves, rather than having topics marked complete automatically when they are opened. This setting applies as a default to newly created content and does not retroactively change the completion settings of topics that already exist in current courses. In addition, learners will still see progress indicators for topics they manually mark as complete. https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/4719-content-configuration-variables

For existing courses, the available alternative is to update the completion setting on the affected content topics and make them optional or not required, where that option is available. This removes those topics from the completion calculation and prevents them from contributing to the module progress indicator. However, it also means that completion for those topics will no longer be tracked. Therefore, there is currently no configuration that hides the indicators while preserving both automatic completion tracking and the other Enhanced Table of Contents functionality. https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/3561-track-content-completion-and-participation

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Regards,
Vivek
Product Support Analyst
D2L