Moodle, one of the world’s most popular open source learning management systems, offers a range of tools to help educators and administrators manage and monitor learner progress. Course completion tracking is a particularly valuable feature that helps ensure learners stay on track and achieve their goals.
Why It Matters
Course completion tracking in Moodle helps organisations create structured, accountable learning environments. Regardless of the educational setting, this tool ensures learners have a clear path to success, while administrators, teachers and managers can oversee progress with confidence.
Here, we’ll explore Moodle’s course completion tracking features and share practical examples of how you can use them to streamline learner management and create a more engaging learning experience.
Course Completion Settings: Progress Tracking
Moodle’s course completion settings allow administrators and teachers to define clear criteria that mark a course as complete. These can include activity completions, grade requirements, or even completion of another course.
How It Works
Define Completion Criteria
Specify which activities or grades are required for a course to be marked as complete. For example, in a health and safety course, learners might need to watch a series of videos and pass a final quiz.
Apply Criteria Across Courses
It is usually good practice to try to standardise requirements across similar courses to maintain consistency.
By setting clear completion criteria, learners understand their goals, and teachers can track progress with ease using course-level reports for course completion.
Activity Completion Tracking: Step-by-Step Accountability
Activity completion tracking breaks down the learner journey into smaller, manageable steps. This feature tracks each activity in a course, ensuring that learners complete key tasks before progressing.
How It Works
Enable Tracking for Activities
For each activity, set a completion condition, such as viewing, receiving a grade, or submitting an assignment.
Monitor Learner Engagement
Teachers and managers can view individual or group progress at a glance with course level reports, ensuring no one falls behind. This level of reporting can also help you identify areas where people are finding content more difficult or not engaging with it at all.
This granular approach builds accountability and keeps learners engaged with their coursework.
Completion Progress Block: Visualising Progress
The Completion Progress block is a Moodle plugin that provides a visual representation of learner progress through a course. This user-friendly tool motivates learners by showing them how far they’ve come and what’s left to achieve.
How It Works
Interactive Dashboard
Learners see a progress indicator with how many activities they have completed and how many they need to complete in total. They can also click to view more information on their progress in an activity report linked from the block
Customisable Views
Teachers can use the block to quickly navigate to reports for their courses and monitor progress
This feature encourages learners to stay on top of their tasks while giving educators the insights needed to provide targeted support.
Reporting and Insights: Data-Driven Decisions
Moodle’s completion tracking is further enhanced by its reporting tools, which provide you with detailed data on learner progress.
How It Works
Completion Reports
Export data showing which learners have completed their courses (or even specific activities), allowing for easy compliance tracking.
Identify At-Risk Learners
Use reports to pinpoint learners who may need additional support, ensuring no one is left behind and people are progressing in a way you would like.
These tools enable informed decision-making, helping educators tailor their approach to meet the needs of their learners.
A Practical Example
Imagine an organisation rolling out a mandatory training course
Depending on your site theme your, activity completion will be reflected in the course in progress tiles on your homepage/dashboard. Catawesome, Catalyst own a bespoke theme for its partners, does this using a completion wheel with a percentage of completion displayed.
Conclusion
Moodle’s course completion tracking tools are designed to empower educators and learners alike, creating a more structured, accountable, and engaging learning experience. By leveraging features like course completion settings, activity tracking, the Completion Progress block, and detailed reporting, you can ensure that learners stay on track and meet their goals, all while giving teachers and administrators the insights needed to provide timely support.
The ability to tailor and visualise progress not only keeps learners motivated but also allows educators to intervene when necessary, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. Whether you’re managing a single course or an entire learning program, Moodle’s course completion tracking provides the flexibility and clarity you need to foster a positive and productive learning environment.
Want to see Course Completion Tracking in action?
Join our Feature Focus webinar series and explore how Moodle’s course completion feature can help your learners stay on track. Our expert eLearning consultants will guide you through live demonstrations and share actionable strategies you can implement right away to optimise your learning management system.
