Originally published March 14, 2019
There have been many comments and questions about course completion tracking in Manager Dashboard & Learning Groups. Within this post I hope to answer those questions, address concerns and help you understand and plan for current limitations.
Enabling Course Completion Tracking
Course Completion Tracking is enabled per course from the Course Administration options. It will mark learners as complete when all required activities in the Table of Contents of the course are completed.
Important Notes:
- You should enable Course Completion Tracking (see Figure 1 below) before learners begin the course as it will not be able to track course completions that occurred prior to enabling the feature.
- Course completion tracking can be set by any Brightspace user who has the Manage Completion Tracking permission found under the Course Completion category in Roles and Permissions.
Figure: The Course Completion Tracking page showing the ability to configure course completion tracking.
What does Course Completion Tracking include?
A learner is set as complete within Manager Dashboard & Learning Groups when all required topics in the Table of Contents have been marked as complete. Viewing a topic within Brightspace or the Brightspace Pulse app automatically marks it as complete.
Important Notes:
- To exclude a topic from completion tracking, set it as Not Required via either the Table of Contents edit in place options or the Activity Tab at the bottom of the topic.
- To require manual confirmation of topic completion, set it as Required: Manual via either the Table of Contents edit in place options or the Activity Tab at the bottom of the topic.
- Content topics that include a SCORM package using the new SCORM engine (Rustici) are read as complete when the completion criteria within the SCORM package is met. Only SCORM packages using the new Rustici SCORM engine include completion reporting data.
- You can include an assignment in your completion tracking criteria for a course by adding it as an activity in your Table of Contents. To do this, select Upload/Create > New Assignment. Alternatively, use the Existing Activities button to add an existing assignment. By default, an assignment is marked as complete when a learner submits a file.
- You can include a quiz in your completion tracking criteria for a course by adding it as an activity in your Table of Contents. To do this, select Upload/Create > New Quiz and the use the Quiz Setup button to fill out the quiz details. Alternatively, use the Existing Activities button to add an existing quiz to your Table of Contents. By default, a quiz is marked as complete when a learner submits at least one attempt. You can modify the criteria for quiz completion to be a minimum passing grade via the Assessment tab when creating or editing the quiz (see Figure 2 below). If you use the minimum passing grade option, you may want to consider allowing multiple attempts on the quiz.
Figure: The Activity Completion Tracking page showing the options for how to track the completion of content.
Completion Data Integrity
Enabling completion tracking after students have started a course; disabling then re-enabling completion tracking; or removing required topics from the table of contents for an in-progress course may result in incomplete completion data in Manager Dashboard and Learning Groups. The completion tracking tool does not retroactively examine the completion activity of learners. It only monitors learner activity while its enabled.
Important Notes:
- If erroneous changes in completion tracking occur or if it is enabled after a course has started, there is a manual process for correcting completion data in Manager Dashboard and Learning Groups that can only be completed by D2L. Please contact your CSM or TAM if you require historical completion data to be imported.
- If you use release conditions with Manager Dashboard and Learning Groups courses, we recommend that you include a checklist activity or review topic at the end of your Table of Contents that uses “Required: Manual” completion tracking to confirm that the learner has viewed all of the appropriate content. This will also reduce the risk of content not being released before a user completes all visible topics.
- If a release condition removes content topics (or they are removed manually) – it is possible that learners may never be able to complete the course. Therefore, we recommend you do NOT remove content topics after learners have started the course.
