Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by Richard O'flynn -
Number of replies: 6
Hi Sam / Others,

When setting up a course we have the following settings block:

Student progress
Completion tracking
Disabled, not shown in activity settings Enabled, control via completion and activity settings
Completion tracking begins on enrolment

My question is regarding the "Completion tracking begins on enrolment" setting.

By switching this setting off we are then basically asking the system to start completion tracking not on enrolment, and hence without any other criteria to specify it must be when the first activity of the course is entered/started?

Looking at the completion/cron.php file however it seems that there is no code to support this? the 'timestarted' field in the 'mdl_course_completions' table is always set to 0 and updated to the completed time when the cron marks courses as completed.

Have I understood this correctly? If so is the "begin completion tracking" option "not" on enrollment going to be supported and if so, can somebody explain what the criteria actually is?

Kind regards

Richard.

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In reply to Richard O'flynn

Re: Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by Jason Hardin -

I can't respond for the core developers as to what the setting was intended to do, but I did scan the 2.0.1 code and the setting is not used anywhere of importance.  It is located in the coursesettings, backup, restore, language and course web service files but not accessed by any of the completion code.

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In reply to Richard O'flynn

Re: Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by sam marshall -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi,

Sorry but I have the same question! This option is related to the course completion (which I didn't code) and not to the activity completion (which I did). I have no idea what it does. Somebody here asked me today actually...

--sam

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In reply to sam marshall

Re: Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by Wen Hao Chuang -

I'm confused with this new feature in Moodle 2.0 too. In fact, I just "checked" and "unchecked" it (Completion tracking begins on enrolment" and it didn't seem to make any differences, and there is no help button or anything...Does anyone know who codes this feature? Thanks!

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In reply to Wen Hao Chuang

Re: Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by Aaron Barnes -

Hi there,

Author of Course Completion here smile

This setting is actually a left over from the original 1.9 code, and shouldn't have made it into 2.0. It's original purpose was to prevent a user being started in a course when they were first enrolled, which was a problem for some site's which had open courses that people were enrolled in automatically when visiting.

I have created a bug in the tracker: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-26644

Sorry for the confusion!
Aaron

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In reply to Aaron Barnes

Re: Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by CT Soo -

Hi, I'm using Moodle 2.1.1 and noticed that in the table mdl_course_completion, the timestarted field is reset to 0 every now and then when admin/cron.php is run. Then if cron.php is run again after sometime (if the student has accessed the course since the last cron run), the timestarted may be set to the last access time - the actual (original) time started is lost. We need to extract info on when students started on their courses, not just enrol (as they may enrol but not start the course until much later.) Is this the right table to extract the info from? If yes, then how should we deal with this reset?

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In reply to Richard O'flynn

Re: Conditional activities: Completion Tracking - Start Time

by Paul Jacobson -

Hi Richard - I'm currently engaged in a conversation with Sam Marshall about "null" conditions in activity tracking because a critical need for our Admin is to flag non-starters of key activities at the start, middle and end of a course.

We need timely intervention with around half of our online students to encourage them to participate. We don't know in advance which half; so we need to monitor everyone. What complicates the issue is the rolling intake throughout the year.

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