I guess the moral of this story is that it takes real students to test a course. When the first 3 students tried a course I compiled, the jumps in Lesson did not work. Then all of a sudden the dependencies were wrong. I was sure this was related to the Activity Locking module and the new dedicated Moodle server. Ultimately, it was mostly all about me.
Short history: I created a concept course and personally tested it through 20 different users. We started using Lesson dependency settings to chain the lessons together, but due to regulations, had to install Activity Locking and use that instead. The course was initially compiled in 25% chunks on my local host then restored to a web Moodle, adding them to an existing course. After the course was built and up, we decided that we really needed a dedicated server and it was transferred.
I looked at the logs as the first student went through the course. In the concept course, they would view 10 branch pages, then be asked a series of questions. They were supposed to go through the questions once and only have one chance to get the answer right. Some of the questions were to be random. However, the log said they might see the same question or series of questions, 3 or 4 times in a single lesson attempt before the end of lesson was reached. And sometimes they would jump back to the same question they just answered. I could duplicate this when I logged in as a student. Obviously, something was broken.
It turned out to be a bald head was not screwed in tightly into the logic language process. I was thinking "random" so my # 4 question had all it's jumps set to random question in a branch. I thought it would pick a random question from that point to the end of the lesson. When I changed them to "unseen question in a branch" no question was repeated. My friendly Webmaster, wrote a MySQL query which changed every jump in the lesson (around 480 jumps) from random to unseen. That was all about me not Moodle.
Another issue had to do with the interaction between Activity Locking, Lesson dependency settings and the restore process used to build the course. The third student was locked out of the #3 lesson with message they needed to complete #25 lesson first. It happened again on the #7 lesson. The locks did not happen for the two students who went before and the only way to see what the third student saw, was to actually log in as that student (Teachers and administrators changing view or using the "log in as" showed no problem). The Activity Lock was removed on the offending lessons, the MySQL AL database checked and confirmed there were no locks but the lock remained for the student. Oops, the Lesson dependency which I had set on the previous lesson, somehow now pointed to a lesson that was to be taken in the future, the #7 lesson.
This was sort of about me. When we switched to AL to set the dependencies, I should have deleted all the Lesson dependency settings. In theory, both should have been saying the same thing. When the site was moved to a new server, I did not check every Lesson settings. The few I looked at were just fine but that was not "every" or even "most" of the lesson settings. Note to file: End of Lesson links and Lesson dependencies do not always point to the same thing when moving a course from site to site.
That is my story and I am sticking with it. Now there are 10 students taking the course without those issues
. I sure wish computers were smarter and programs would do what I want and not what I say.Hope this helps others, Chris