Moodle in English: New activity: checklist

Hi David

I am trying to set up a checklist whereby the creator adds all the tasks, then the student can tick them off and see progress.

I don't want the student to be able to edit the list or add new ones just tick and save the ones already on the list.

I have tried on all permission levels and cannot seem to get this working, can you give me some pointers

Thanks

Helen

What you describe is more or less exactly what the default setting for the checklist module is (with the exception of switching the setting 'students can add their own items' to 'No' - but that only allows students to add their own, private, notes to a list, which doesn't affect anyone else).

If you want to check the capabilities, they should be set as follows:

Teacher:

mod/checklist:edit (so they can set up a checklist for the students)
mod/checklist:preview (so they can check it looks OK)
mod/checklist:viewreports (so they can see what the students have ticked)
mod/checklist:updateother (this was supposed to be related to teacher-marked lists, but looking back at the code, I forgot to implement this one, so this is controlled by 'viewreports' instead)

Student:

mod/checklist:updateown (so they can tick-off items and then save their progress)

If that still doesn't work, then please get back in contact and I'll try to figure out what is going wrong.

Just a quick note here, to mention that there have been quite a few additions to the checklist module, since the first version was launched.

The additions include:

Lists can be set to be updated by students or teachers or both
Students can add their own, private, items (+notes) to lists, to help them keep track of any details not included in the original list
The report view can show progress bars instead of full details (there is also a block available to display the progress bars in the side-panel)
Dates can be added to items and optionally exported directly into the course calendar
Checklist results are added to the gradebook
Teachers can comment on the items on a student's checklist

as well as quite a number of bug fixes and usability enhancements.

There are currently no more changes planned before updating to work with Moodle2.0, but please feel free to add any other requests / bug reports.

Hello,

I am looking to use this also for staff tasks as a simple "project management" and task tracking system. We are currently using Collabtive for that, but I'd like to eliminate that extra login and keep everything within Moodle.

My question is: is there any way to copy and reuse checklists? And/or create template checklists?

That would make this extremely useful, as we have many routine tasks/checklists to be done on a weekly or monthly basis.

-T

This module was never really intended for staff checklists and does not have any functionality for copying checklists (other than the standard backup & restore functionality) or creating templates.

You might want to have a look at the Trackpad module ( http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=2867&filter=1 ) or possibly the Tracker module ( http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=1124&filter=1 ), as they might be closer to what you are looking for. My module is much more focussed on checklists that are created once by one person (the teacher) and checked off by lots of others (the students).

Thomas,

Try the Progress Bar Module this may be more what you are looking for.

I have it ready for our summer update to the production Moodle.

Regards

At first I think it's automatically show the students progress (say completed quiz, read topic or not), when I take a look in that, is it just an option for student to click and add self progress? I think I would perfer for my initial thinking

Completion tracking in Moodle 2.0 is what you are looking for (which I plan to link with my checklist module, when I have time).

The point of this module is for students to track their own progress (and for teachers to be able to track where the students are up to) and it is much more fine-grained than a simple 'activity completed or not' check (I use it with assignments, to make sure students cover everything needed, before they submit it).

Thanks for your reply

I also tried your plugin, seems don't know how to use, I add an item, but for student, they can add the item but seems no where to edit the percentage of the progress?

@Lawrence, I am a little confused by your message, so I'll try to explain clearly how to use my module.

Teacher logs in and creates a checklist with a number of items on it
Student logs in, clicks on the checklist and ticks each of the items that they have now finished
Student clicks 'Save'
The percentage progress is automatically updated, based on what the students have ticked.

If you have chosen to set the checklist to be marked by 'Teachers' or 'Teachers and Students', then the proceedure is a little different:

Teacher logs in and creates a checklist with a number of items on it
Click on 'View Progress'
Click on the 'Magnifying glass' beside a student's name
Choose 'Yes' or 'No' for each item a student has completed
Click 'Save'
The student's progress percentage is automatically updated

The script is not working for me. I uploaded it to the mods folder and ran Notifications. The progress bars are not showing up and I cannot think of any reason why.

Does the checklist show up in the list of activities to add to a course?

Have you created a checklist for the students to fill in?

Have they filled it in and clicked save?

You will need to be a bit more specific about what is / isn't working, before I can help you (especially as there are several places where progress bars can show up)

My apology. I figured it out.

Checklist and I got off to a rough start. First, when I downloaded the script I clicked on "latest version". This did not work as my Moodle version is 1.92+. Secondly, I did not realize that teachers check off activities in a considerably different way than students. Teachers must do it through the "magnifying glass".

Not very intuitive. Maybe you can better support this fact in the documentation. I am sure others have had the same problem and others will in the future. But now that I have it working I would like to say that you did a good job.

Glad you got it working!

To address the points you made:
For any module which has been updated to work with Moodle 2.0, the 'latest version' will always be incompatible with Moodle 1.9 (and below), due to the large number of changes made during the transition. It is impractical to make one download that works with both versions, which is why there is a separate 'Moodle 1.9' download link.

Teachers need to check off items in a different way, due to the fact that you need some way of selecting which student you want to check items off for (hence the magnifying glass icon, to view their entry). If you can suggest a better way of doing this, then I am open to hearing it (I have had one suggestion of adding the 'yes/no' dropdowns onto the report page, but I still need to see if that would work).

As for the documentation, it looks like I have not updated it since I added in the ability for teachers to update checklists (this was not part of the original design, but was requested by one of the users). Feel free to update the documentation on the moodle website ( http://docs.moodle.org/en/Checklist_module ) or to send through some updated text for the readme.txt file, but I'm a bit too snowed under at the moment to update either myself (maybe once the summer holidays start...).

Hi

Thanks for creating this module. It works really well once you have spent 10 minutes or so playing with the features and trying things out using both teacher and student roles. We plan to use this activity in three or four different uses including tracking induction progress and simple project tracking.

A question - is it possible to display the progress bars within the main Moodle course page? This would make it nice and easy for students to see what stage they are at.

Thanks

Peter

Not (currently) possible on the course view, but clicking on 'checklists' on the top left of the course page will show the progress through all checklists.

Davo

Great activity. I am preparing to use it for several classes, and came across a small bug. When you set the date of completion, the checklist registers the day prior to the selected date. The easy fix to to just select a day ahead, but I thought I would bring this to your attention.

Simple, and yet rewarding for students to see their progress. Nice job.
Willy Felton

Works fine on all the installs I've tried it on. However, it may have something to do with the gmmktime function that generates a time based on GMT (which is surely the only timezone worth considering anyway...

).

If you get a chance, try opening up this file:

mod/checklist/locallib.php

Find the functions 'updateitemtext' and 'additem' and change 'gmmktime' to 'mktime'.

If you then add a new item with a date (or edit the date of an existing item), then it should add it to the calendar with the correct date.

If this does fix the problem, let me know and I'll roll it into the next version that I upload.

OK, so that change fixed the display inside the checklist activity. But the value being stored in the class calendar is still incorrect.
I have included a short video of me showing the issues.
http://screencast.com/t/YmNjNThm

Thanks

Thanks for the video (that is the first time I've ever got a bug report in that format!).

I've filed a bug here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2271 and I'll try to dig a bit deeper over the weekend. It really should be completely fixable (but I might have to play around with the locale settings on my dev box to reproduce it properly).

I've checked in a fixed version of the checklist activity to CVS (the new download link should be ready at midnight UTC) - I've switched to using some of the built-in Moodle function calls to handle the date creation & display, so it should all be working now (whatever timezone you are in).

Note: previously created dates will not be updated (but all new/edited dates will be correct).

Worked like a charm. Thanks for your quick response. The dates seem to be working perfectly now.

Hi Davo,

in the description of your module here, I can read : "This is a Moodle package (an activity module and a block) for Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0..."

But I can't find the block ! Where is it ?

Bye,

Patrice

Hi Patrice,

If you scroll down a bit on the Checklist page you'll see Download for Moodle 1.9 and other versions too.

cheers,
Glenys

Bonjour Glenys,

OK for the activity but where is the block ?

I've updated the link, so that the package (with both the module and the block) is now downloaded.

As soon as it is approved, this should work. Until then, the direct download link is: http://download.moodle.org/download.php/packages19/checklist_package.zip

(Note, this is for Moodle 1.9 only - the checklist block will be updated to work with Moodle 2.0 at some point, for now only the module works with Moodle 2.0)

I have been using the checklist module for a couple of weeks now and my students and I really like it. However, I'm wondering if the sort order is supposed to revert to first name order after editing each student's checklist? Everything else I do is sorted by last name and it sticks, but the checklists always reverts to first name after every save.

Also, is there any way to go directly from one student to another when checking off items in the list, without having to go back to View All Progress to select the next student?

If the sort order is reverting when you mark a student's checklist, then that is a bug - it's supposed to preserve the sort order for as long as you are using the checklist. I'll investigate and get back to you on that one. ( http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2524 )

I can look into implementing 'save and next' and 'next' buttons - I've created a tracker issue for this - http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2523 if you want to track and progress I make (but no promises of having time to do this in the immediate future).

I had more free time (and motivation) than I expected this evening, so I've now fixed both of those issues.

There should be a new version available to download at midnight UTC.

wow! Thanks for the quick response. My students and I really enjoy using this and those two new buttons make it so much quicker for me to update my part of our checklists that we use.

Thanks again.

Davo,

I there a way to do a link between the items of the list and others files or web pages (to complete the informations for the students). For example, It would be useful
to put html on the items or
to autolink to an article of glossary...

Thank you for your job,

Patrice

I've created a tracker issue for that one ( http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2332 ). But, I'm rather snowed-under at the moment with lesson prep for the coming year, so it'll probably be a little while before I pick up the checklist code again.

Hi

Huge fan of the checklist. However, do have a question.

We are using the Checklist for a tutorials course page. The idea is that a student and their tutor sits down, discusses the progress of the student, and then the tutor makes a record of targets via the checklist.

However, I'm starting to realise that the Checklist doesn't allow tutors to create checklists for individual students. And, in fact, as the course is using Groups, it doesn't seem to work with Groups either.

So, onto Plan B - get the students to complete the Checklist. However, if there's no initial list to check off, then it would appear they can't add their own entries from scratch.

Am I right/wrong? I was really hoping tutors could create checklists for individual students, but this doesn't appear to be the case.

Hope you can clarify!

Dan

You can create checklists that are visible only to certain students, by using groupings, but that would be massively unwieldy, if you wanted 1 per student, so I'd not recommend that route.

I'm afraid that the checklist module was always intended to work with a central checklist, set by the teacher to a class, to monitor the whole-class progress through that list. I guess that I could extend it to work in the situation you have mentioned, but it was never really designed to do that, so could get messy.

One thought - you could try creating a checklist with a single, 'dummy' item in it, which the student could then add their own items to (but be aware that the teacher would not be able to see how the student was progressing, as student items are regarded as 'private notes').

As an alternative, you could try the 'Trackpad' module - http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=2867&filter=1 (I've not really used it, but it might be what you are looking for).

As an aside, the checklist does work with groups, but only in the sense that you can view the progress for different groups - it does not allow for there to be different checklists for each group (other than by creating 2 checklists and hiding them from the other group using 'groupings').

Hey - thanks for the response.

I guess I got so excited about the Checklist that I didn't really research it properly, and now the elements it can't do are coming back to haunt me. lol.

Thanks for the TrackPad - looks interesting and could be just what we need.

Dan

Hi Dan,

Sound more like you want the individual targets in the ILP modules.

Stuart

Hi Everyone,

Firstly, I want to thank you for creating this great plugin. I work at a faculty teaching center in higher ed and just started playing around with this tool. I could see many uses for this, for example for creating routine checklist for students studying foreign language or for creating a list of unit competencies or benchmarks that certain assignments fulfill.

One question I still have regarding group mode. I'd like to give students the ability to create checklists to monitor their team's progress on project milestones. That is, team members can:

add items to list (could be list started by teacher or start a new list entirely)
everyone in that team can see added items
students in team can check off items in checklist and progress bar updates automatically
teacher has way to somehow track who added item or who checked off which individual item (like a wiki)

I'd be curious to know if anyone has ideas about this? I am still new to checklists and I apologize in advance if this option is already available.

Thank you again Davo for creating this great plugin. I am excited to introduce it at our faculty workshops!

Hi Davo,

Thanks for this great contribution; I think it has a lot of possibilities and is very useful as is. I particularly like the flexibility in who can create and check-off items on lists.

Further to monkey_123's comment about language learning, a number of countries and agencies have benchmark checklists that learners use for self-assessment and/or assessment by teachers as a means of keeping track of their strengths and weaknesses.

A popular example would be the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) "Can do" checklists. However they differ from your checklist in that they have 3 states rather than 2. Here's a CEFR checklist for beginner (A1) learners: http://matbury.com/html/cefrl/pdf/cefrl_can_do_a1.pdf (There's already a dedicated CEFR "Can do" plugin for Mahara).

I can imagine that others might want to use checklists that have 3 or more states like this. It's a way for learners to relay back to instructors and peers where their personal strengths and weaknesses lie and what they'd like to work on more.

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks again and all the best for the new year!

Matt,

I've been asked before about multi-state checklist items. It would be doable, but the code is rather more messy than I'd like, so it could require a bit of rewriting to enable it (aside from the obvious problem of how to calculate the total progress, when there is more than one state available).

Ideally, the first thing to do would be to rewrite the code so that only one function handled the updating of the checkmark data and only one place was used to calculate the total progress, which would then make it easier to change how this worked (plus add some automated testing, so that I could check I've not broken anything in the process).

In all it could probably be done it I had a spare couple of days to work on it (plus another day or two to write some detailed automated tests to make sure I didn't break anything in the process).

As I've just mentioned in my last post to this forum, I don't know when I'll next have that big a chunk of spare evenings to tackle it though (I've got enough on just trying to get my plugins are tested against the new versions of Moodle every 6 months).

Hi monkey_123,

Sorry, I'm afraid that there isn't really any groups support in the checklist module (teachers can filter the progress view by group, but that's about it). What you're asking for would involve a reasonable amount of development time, as currently:

Items can only be added by teachers, not students (students can add private sub-items underneath an item added by a teacher, but they cannot be seen by anyone other than a student).
Checkmarks are owned by an individual, not by a group (I guess I could write something that would aggregate checkmarks across a group, whilst still tracking them per-person).
Displaying who checked-off each individual mark isn't currently part of the output (as checkmarks are currently only associated with a single person anyway, rather than a group).

I'd guess that we're talking about 2 or 3 days development work (which is something I'm unlikely to have time to do in the evening for quite some time) - it should be quicker than that, but the internals of the checklist code is a lot messier than I would like; it has grown quite a bit in ways I'd never originally intended ...

I'm glad you're finding the plugin helpful, as it currently works.

Davo,

Thanks. This is still a great plugin!

-Tania

If you set up groups, can you have it set so that all members of a group can see each other's progress or is that only for the teacher to be able to see?

Progress for other people is only visible to teachers (or anyone who has the capability 'checklist:viewreports'). If they can see other people's progress, then everyone can be seen. Groups just allow you to only view one group at a time.

where can I see or edit checklist:viewreports ?

nevermind I found it. Sorry, but I am a relative newB

Ok turns out I did not have it figured out.

I can add check list to my class under add activities, but not under add blocks. Is that the way it should be?

Where can I see or edit checklist:viewreports ?

This is for a book club class and we want to have everyone be able to check off what they have read and have it visible to everyone in the class. Is this possible? How would I go about setting that up?

If you have installed both the checklist module and the checklist block (both included in the download package), then you should be able to 'turn editing on' then add the checklist block. You then need to click on the 'edit settings' button and set up the checklist to display (and, optionally, the group to display).

Students will see a bar showing their progress through that checklist.

Teachers will see a bar showing the progress of all the students (in the chosen group) through that checklist.

To set up the permissions for mod_checklist:viewreports, you either need to change the settings for students globally by going through the 'Administration' section of the website, or create a separate role (e.g. student_checklist) and assign students into that role for a particular checklist (click on 'Edit settings', then 'Assign local roles'). Instructions for creating roles / modifying role permissions can be found here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Manage_roles

Some of what you describe I have working... but not all.

Screenshots of problem http://www.screencast.com/t/UFmn8U4qLyPx

I'm not sure why the checklist block is not appearing - you appear to have everything in the right place.

Please can you check 'Administration->Modules->Blocks->Manage Blocks' and see if 'Checklist' is listed there. If it is, make sure it is visible (the hide/show icon).

If it is visible there, but not in the course, try deleting the folder 'moodle/blocks/checklist' and re-uploading it (this solved a similar problem that someone else had). You should also go to the 'Administraiton->Notifications' screen, just in case that helps.

As for the permissions issue, here is a guide to that: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/933969/Students%20view%20reports.pdf

Note: there were a couple of small bugs in the code for students with the 'view reports' permission (it's not something I'd ever tried), so you may want to grab the latest version of the code when it's released at midnight UTC.

OK, thanks I got it working.

I deleted the checklist folder under blocks. I re-uploaded it using a diferent file manager. I think CPanel file manager sometimes screws up some of the file by adding blank lines to the end of files.

After I got the block working I had more options on the participant role screen and got that working too.

Thanks.

This is very useful and just the kind of simple task list that I need to manage a large number of tasks to be done by a group of students. The only thing I wish I had was an import method for large task lists. Is there any way to do that aside from inserting directly into the DB?

It's not a feature I'd ever thought of adding.

Seems like a very good idea, but I can't promise to have time to add an import (and possibly export) feature to the checklist in the near future.

For the moment, it would have to be a direct import into the DB (although one other possibility would be to run a course backup with just a single checklist selected, edit the 'moodle.xml' file inside the zip, then restore from the backup).

I've opened up a tracker issue here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2494

If you 'watch' that issue, then you will be notified if/when I get time to add that feature.

Davo and others

I followed instructions and copied the block and mod folders into my moodle folder. I got this:

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$colour in /home/moodecom/public_html/scm/mod/checklist/locallib.php on line 866

It's driving me nuts. Any ideas what could be wrong?

Frankie Kam (Melaka, Malaysia_

Frankie:

Sounds like the database tables aren't set up - did you log in as admin and click on the 'notifications' link?

If you have access to the database (e.g. via phpmyadmin, or similar), can you check that these database tables exist:

checklist
checklist_item
checklist_check
checklist_comment

Also check that the 'checklist_item' table has a field called 'colour' (which is what is being complained about in this instance).

Davo

I've checked in a new version of my code that fixes this bug - it shouldn't have caused any problems, other than just that error message (if you debug level was set high enough). The error should only have appeared when adding new items.

At midnight (UTC) there should be a new download available (and thanks for the bug report).

Just updating here with a few new features that have been added to the checklist module recently:

Colours - you can choose from a range of tasteful colours for each checklist item
Headings - items can be converted into headings (in bold, without a checkbox)
(Optional) Automatically import a list of course activities - individual activities / course sections can be hidden from the list if required
(Optional) Automatically tick-off items on the list when the associated activities are 'completed' - this requires a couple of small code changes to the Moodle core code and works reasonably well with all the standard Moodle modules (and the Moodle 2.0 completion system).

Please try it out and let me know if there are any problems.

I absolutely love the changes you made to this activity. I cannot get the progress bar to show any progress on my moodle. Also when I look at the progress bar while editing the checklist, it does not show any progress as well. If I have 4 courses and one is checked, it still shows up as 0. Could I have put the code in the wrong place on the various lib mods made?

Thanks for this wonderful update.

Are you viewing this as a student or a teacher?

Teachers (unless you add the capability 'checklist:updateown') can't update their checklist, so they will always see an empty bar.

The various changes you made are there to intercept the log updates (e.g. 'view resource', 'edit wiki page') and use them to check-off the relevant item in the checklist, as well as to intercept the 'update grade' part of the 'quiz', 'assignment' and 'forum' activities, to use them to check-off items if the user's score is above the amount you set on the checklist. These only work if you have enabled the 'show course modules in checklist' option. If you manually update the checklist and click 'save', then you can override the automatic updates (you can disallow manual updates, from the settings page).

Thanks for posting where in the code the updates were to be made. This was exceedingly helpful. I had them in the wrong place.

I cannot get the progress bar to display as a student as well. If I complete a course, it does not update the status or the progress bar. I really want this to work as I think this is an invaluable tool.

I'm still a bit confused by the phrase 'if I complete a course'. The checklist does not track the completion of courses, it tracks the completion of activities.

For assignments/forums/quizzes, if a student is given a grade greater than (or equal to) the grade you specify on the checklist edit page, then that item is checked-off on the checklist. For all other activities (that I have coded for), the item is checked-off when the student does something on that activity (views a resource, etc.). For a full list of the log entries that if monitors, look in mod/checklist/autoupdate.php .

Note, that the automatic updating only affects student marks, if you have set the checklist to 'teacher' or 'student and teacher' marks, then the total will not be updated.

I think I have misunderstood what this checklist is to do (or wishful thinking on my part). I was hoping that the checklist would track course completion or provide a progress bar as to percent complete. The odd thing is that it does track completion of a course (see the picture with the greyed out checkmark) along with assignments (the full checkmark) but does not update the progress bar. The course is "search" and was not shown completion by me or the teacher, but a status given by moodle. I was under the impression that if the checkmark was received under this course, that it would also show on the progress bar. Neither is showing.

Looking at the screenshot, you have the checklist set to 'student and teacher' can both update it. In that case, I take the teacher's mark as authoritive (for the purspose of drawing the progress bar), rather than what the student has ticked.

If you want the progress bar to update, based on what the student has ticked-off (or what has been automatically ticked-off, based on what the student has done), you need to change the 'Updates by' setting to 'Student only'.

Hallo,

first of all, thank you for this really wonderful modul and block.

I`ve tried the new version.
The colours and the automatically import of activities works fine.
But I have Problems with the automatically tick-off items. I made the changes to the moodle core. But I think the problem is, that I don`t know exactly where to put the changes.

* Open the file: moodle/lib/datalib.php
Find the function 'add_to_log', then add these lines to the end of it:

require_once($CFG->dirroot.'/mod/checklist/autoupdate.php');
checklist_autoupdate($courseid, $module, $action, $cm, $userid);

Where is the end?
After:

$info = addslashes($info);
if (!empty($url)) { // could break doing html_entity_decode on an empty var.
$url = html_entity_decode($url); // for php < 4.3.0 this is defined in moodlelib.php
}

before

// Restrict length of log lines to the space actually available in the

???

The same with the "quizz", "forum" and "assignment" lib.php.

Could you please explain it?

Thanks again for your wonderfull work

Ralf

Once you've added the code into the 'add_to_log' function, then the last bit of it should look like this:

if (!$result) { debugging('Error: Could not insert a new entry to the Moodle log', DEBUG_ALL);
}

require_once($CFG->dirroot.'/mod/checklist/autoupdate.php'); checklist_autoupdate($courseid, $module, $action, $cm, $userid); } /** * Store user last access times - called when use enters a course or site * * Note: we use ADOdb code directly in this function to save some CPU * cycles here and there. They are simple operations not needing any * of the postprocessing performed by dmllib.php * * @param int $courseid, empty means site * @return void */ function user_accesstime_log($courseid=0) {

Similarly with the 'quiz', etc. changes, find the 'function' call I mentioned in the README, scroll down until you find the next line in the file that starts 'function', then scroll back up again until you find the '}' on its own a few lines above this.

The code needs to go before that closing '}'.

Hope that is clearer. I'll add some extra help into the plugin download (although that won't be avaiable until tomorrow, at the earliest).

See here: http://cvs.moodle.org/contrib/plugins/mod/checklist/core_modifications.txt?revision=1.1.2.1&view=markup&pathrev=MOODLE_19_STABLE

for the extra instructions I have written to help with this (they will be included in the main download from midnight, UTC).

Thank you very much for the changes you have made especially the auto update feature, which our staff will appreciate.

I have a couple of queries:

1. From my tests it seems that the checklist will only show any progress made after the activity is added. This might seem obvious but I'm comparing with the progress bar block, which does show the whole year's work even if the progress bar block is added in the middle of the year.

2. How does the date feature work? I couldn't get the checklist to retain any date I put in. I wasn't sure whether I needed to click "add", "save" or both but I tried lots of combinations.

I am using postgresql and moodle 1.9. There are no errors reported in the log.

Regards
Barbara

1. This should work, but on checking the code, it only updates if you change one of the 'completion grades' then click save (these are the scores that the user needs to obtain to 'pass' the assignment, quiz or forum activities).

I've just checked in a version that will fix this (available midnight UTC), but it will require either creating a new checklist, or adding a new activity/resource to the course, then editing the checklist to trigger an update.

2. With the dates, click 'start editing dates', then whenever you edit or create a checklist item you can add a date to it by: unticking the 'disabled' box, selecting a date from the drop-down, clicking the 'add' or 'update' button. This is working fine with the latest version on my test server.

Hi Davo

Thanks for your changes for #1, that works now.

As for the dates: I think I just don't understand what the dates feature is for. I can only add / change dates to manually added items, not the automatic ones. Is that how it works?

Barbara

Yes, only manually added items support dates, at the moment (the organisation that paid me to add the automatic items was not interested in dates).

At some point in the future I may have time to extend the code to cover automatic items as well (possibly picking up dates directly from the relevant activity), but I'm not likely to do that in the next few weeks.

Thanks for the clarification and thanks once again for all your hard work.

Hi Davo

I've just noticed a small problem with importing course activities. If a topic is empty but is followed by topics which are not empty (it does happen) then the checklist doesn't import anything after the empty topic.

Barbara

@Barbara:

OK, I'll look into it - I've added it to tracker here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2762

Let me first say that we've had great success with both students and staff using this excellent activity! Davo Smith really deserves a lot of credit for his work on this.

It would be an improvement to be able to import activities and have them automatically checked off upon completion, as I understand is possible now.

However, I am wary of doing so because:

I am no programmer and the phrase "modifications of core Moodle code" is scary!
We use groupings for many activities and don't want the activities of group A cluttering up the checklists of group B, and we have a lot of checklists set up for each course (one per day of class), so a wholesale import of activities would not do. Not having tried it, is it possible to only import individual activities?

Someone mentioned before wanting the ability to autolink to an article or glossary, so that got me to wonder if it is possible to have the module recognize the Moodle autolink filter for activities and resources.

If so (I realize that this is just as much a question concerning filters and groupings as this module but bear with me), is it possible that an autofilter would direct students of different groups to their correct activity??

For example:

The course has an activity named "Activity 1" available only to Group A, and another activity also named "Activity 1" available only to Group B.
A checklist has an item called "Activity 1". If the module recognizes the activities autofilter, this item would become a link to Activity 1 - but which one? Would it become a link to the Group A activity for that group and to the Group B for that activity?

Again, this module works wonderfully for us as is, but one can always dream of more, right?

1. I don't like core modifications either and generally avoid them. However, I could not see any other way of intercepting the log/grade updates needed to track the completion of items. One alternative, without core modifications, has occured to me this morning, but it will be a while before I have time to try it out (you can follow any progress here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2741 ).

2. If you set a checklist to import course modules (and this is a per-checklist option), then it will import all course modules (except itself). However, you can then 'hide' individual activities (or whole course sections) from the checklist.

The rest of what you have written brings up a rather more complicated issue (and one which I will need to address, when I next have some free time to look into it):

Hidden activities should not be shown in the checklist ( http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2739 ) - this should be fairly easy to sort out, but a bit fiddly in places (big question - should hidden activities contribute to the total number of items that need to be completed?)
Activities should not be shown if they do not match the current grouping - this one scares me quite a bit as it would mean having different checklist items for different users, which could get very messy
Trying to second-guess what the user meant when there are two activities with the same name and different groupings - sadly this has a huge potential for going wrong. Firstly, each checklist item can only link to a single course module (so it knows which one to track in terms of completion and name changes, etc.). Secondly, a user could be part of 2 groupings and so could be capable of seeing both activities. Thirdly, I could see all sorts of obscure bugs caused by people giving two activities (possibly in different sections of a course), the same name and then wondering why the checklist wasn't working properly.

The first two of those issues I will look at when I can.

The last issue is something I'd only consider doing for a specific site, rather than as a general solution. At that point, I'm afraid I'd have to be asking to be paid for that particular customisation (I have to fit my Moodle coding in around my IT-teaching day job, so there is a limit to the number of changes I can take on without asking for something to cover my time).

Like you I have been very busy so I hate to possibly add something else for you to check on/fix but I think there is a bug that can cause the teachers checks to become incorrect.

I use a checklist that Updates by Student and Teacher. When I view the progress of a student and Click the Next button, the boxes for the teacher and the ghost check marks for the student are shown for the student you just left. In other words they do not update and show info for the current student. The Save and show next button exhibits the same behaviour.

I was using a version from back in December but just updated to the current version available on Feb 5. Both versions work the same way for me.

Thanks for your time and effort on making this very handy module and block.

Thanks for pointing out that bug. You are absolutely right - I process the user switching after loading all the items and the checkmarks (which I have to do, as I need to see if any of them have updated and save them back to the database), but then forgot I would need to reload them for the new user.

This is all now fixed (with just 1 line of code), just about to be checked in to CVS and a brand new download should automatically appear at midnight UTC.

Thanks again for the bug report (and apologies that it was necessary in the first place).

Thank you so much for this module. It is absolutely wonderful for our self-paced classes. One reason I was reluctant to get completely away from "paper" assignment sheets was that students could not tell where they had left off from the previous day. This feature eliminates that problem. I do have one feature request if it's not already available. (I have searched extensively but do not see that it is available) We would love it if there was some way to embed the checklist activity within an assignment submission page. That way as students submitted a file, they could simply check it off in the checklist. As of now, I have a link from the checklist to my submission page and vice versa, but again it would be nice for it to be all in the same place. Thanks so much for your consideration. Kim Conant

The only embedding of checklists that is available is that if you use my 'uploadpdf' assignment plugin, you can choose to include a checklist progress bar in the assignment submission screen and (optionally) prevent them from submitting before they have completed everything on the list.

If you have installed the latest version of the checklist and made the core moodle modifications (which will become unecessary soon, but I need to finish checking the code carefully), then you can have items that automatically tick themselves off once a student has submitted an assignment (or you can choose to make it check-off once they have achieved a certain mark for the assignment).

To update - the checklist now respects both the hidden status of activities and the grouping status (if 'group members only' is selected).

I've tested the new code and I'm confident that it is all OK, but the grouping code was quite fiddly to implement, so there may be some small bugs lurking around.

I've checked in a few updates, with fixes suggested by various posts here:

Core modifications are no longer needed to get the automatic checking-off of items working (although there will be a short delay of up to 60 seconds between a student completing an activity and the item being checked-off)
Empty sections in a course no longer confuse the importing of modules into the checklist
Hidden items in a course are automatically hidden in the checklist (but not yet working for items hidden due to their 'grouping' setting)

We uploaded the newest update and I modified my checklists to allow the automatic checking-off of items. However, I have run into a few problems.

I had students go into my Unit 6 checklist which I modified to include the modules for Unit 6 for them to submit their files. However, I did not realize that when I added these submission activites for Unit 6, it also included them in the Unit 7 and 8 checklists. So instead of them being checked off in Unit 6, they were being checked off in Unit 7. I hid the modules in Unit 7 and 8 checklist, but the Unit 6 checklist is still not updating to show that they have submitted the files. The files are submitted though.

Also, students are submitting files in Unit 7 but they are not being checked off. I'm wondering if I have something set incorrectly.

A request: It would be much simpler if the uploading of modules had an option to only upload the activities within the particular topic/section. It is rather time-comsuming to hide all the modules not being used. And then having to remember to go back to all previously created checklists to hide the new activities. Also, the hide button seems backwards to me. It is closed when the activity is viewable, and open when it is hidden.

Thanks

Whenever a checklist is updated / created, it should automatically go back through all the log entries and check-off any items that should now be checked-off. Item checking-off should also happen (in the background) whether or not the item is shown in the list (unless students have manually checked-off the item, in which case, only that checklist will be updated).

Can you do a quick experiment - find an item for which there is a 'completion score' option, set a score, 'save completion scores', then set it back to 'Any'. Let me know if that updates the check-marks for the whole checklist to what they should be.

I've added the 'only import from current section' request to the list here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2786 - I can't promise a fix date, as the requests are currently coming in much faster than I can sort them out (even with the half-term holiday last week!).

Yes, the icons are the wrong way around in the latest Moodle 1.9 version - got myself confused with a double-negative. Fix checked in - ready to download immediately.

I did the experiment and it did update the checklist to show items the students had submitted for that unit. Thank you!

However, I am noticing that I have to go back in periodically and do the same thing to get the checklists to update. Is it because I made changes to checklist after they got started on it? Trying to figure out how to avoid having to do this in the future.

Kim, the checklists should automatically update whenever the 'cron' job runs.

Could you check the log files from the 'cron' job and see if the checklist activity is updating there?

You could also try manually visiting <moodle_url>/admin/cron.php and seeing if it mentions the checklist (which it might not, if it has been run by your cron job within the last 60 seconds).

Davo,

Thank you for your assistance. Even though I have an admin account, I am using Moodle through our co-op and am not familiar with some of the administrative processes. Where can I access the log files for the 'cron' job? I see log files for users but not for jobs. Can I see this or is that something that the site admin where Moodle is installed has to do?

Kim, the latest version of the checklist now has an option to choose between importing all the activities in a course, or just importing the activities from the current section of the course.

Also, to explain 'cron' a little more. On a Moodle server, there are certain things that should happen in the background at different times, without someone having to manually start them off (e.g. clearing temporary files, sending a batch of emails, etc.). Assuming the server is set up correctly, it should call the page 'admin/cron.php' on a regular basis (every 60 seconds, I think) and that should then call any plugins that are due to update (including asking my checklist plugin to read through the log entries and gradebook entries in the database and update the check-marks as appropriate).

When the cron page is run, it generates some output. I assume that your web server stores this output somewhere, so that it can be checked, in the case of any problems. You will need to ask your hosting provider where (and if) they store the output from this cron job and to send it to you, so you can check for the checklist being updated.

If this still does not work, the alternative is the core modifications included in the instructions (this basically does exactly the same thing as the cron job, but instead of checking through the recent log/grade entries every 60 seconds, it intercepts the log/grade entries before they are saved).

Thanks Davo! The new feature will be wonderful! I will check with my site admin about the cron file. I appreciate your help in getting this figured out.

Davo,

The site admin looked at the cron job and fixed it so that it is now updating like it is supposed to. Thanks again!

Glad it's all working properly now.

Hi Davo,

I'm working on the Dutch translation for the checklist module and encountered "Save Completion Grades" and "Completion grades are raw scores, not percentages".

Now I'm working on the Moodle 1.9 version, later for the 2.0 version.

I'm wrestling with the meaning of this button, to make a good translation.

Can you please elaborate on this button?

Moodle 1.9 does not, by default, have a concept of 'completion' for activities / courses.

To get around this, and allow my checklist to automatically check-off items (if it is configured to do so), I search through the log files, to find out if someone has done something suitable with that activity (viewed a resource, attempted a quiz, posted on a forum, etc.) and then check-off that item. In addition to this, I was asked to add a feature whereby certain activities (quiz, assignment, forum), could be considered 'complete' when the user achieved a certain grade on them. Hence the idea of 'completion grades' - the minimum grade that the student needs to gain for the activity to be marked as 'complete' on the checklist. The extra note, is to avoid some of the confusion caused by, for example, on a quiz that is marked out of 20 - a completion grade of '18' means they need to score 18/20 on the quiz, not that they need to score '18%' (3.6 / 20).

The button / message only show when you have the 'show course modules in checklist' option enabled and you are on the edit screen.

Thnx for the comments. This I can use

Screencast demo of the checklist activity now online here:

We've been playing with this and it's great, thanks. We've been wanted something that automatically checks things off instead of having to rely on students doing it themselves which our teachers reckon they won't do!

However, could it be edited to consider a forum activity complete once a student has simply posted rather than the post have to be rated, and an assignment complete once it has been submitted and not only once it's been graded?

Michelle

Michelle, just leave the setting at 'Any' (the default) and forums will be checked-off when a student posts a reply or a discussion, and assignments will be checked-off on submission.

Thanks Davo.

Hi Dave ,

I have installed your checklist and placed the files in the various directories. It shows up under Block but when I select the edit but it the screen below

when going to Modules - activities - checlist I see the following

I must have done something as I am a rookie at this but do you have any idea what could cause this?

thanks

Peter

The block looks like that, because it is waiting for you to select a checklist to display in the block, but you haven't created one yet.

Add a checklist to your course (Turn course editing on, then select, Add an Activity => Checklist), then you will be able to use the block.

The settings screen is blank, because I had a setting there, but I've now removed it. If I just delete the setting file, then anyone who upgrades, will still see the old option that shouldn't be there any more, but by leaving the empty settings file in place, everyone is slightly confused by the lack of any settings.

Maybe I should just delete the file and add some instructions telling people to remove it, if it is there...

Thank you Dave that did the trick off course!

Peter

Hi Dave,

First of all I want to compliment you on a terrific module. I can see a lot of usefull purposes for checklists in courses.

I have a question regarding the usage of the checklist block. I have a course with separate groups (forced) and in every group I have a different teacher and when I logon as one of those teachers I see all students in the checklist block. Just to be sure there are no inherit capability-issues, I have forced the accessallgroups for the teacher role in the course to prohibit, but with the "normal" forced groups course settings this obviously does not need to be done.

Am I missing something here or does the block always show all the students in the course, regardless of (separate) group course settings?

When I enter the checklist activity as a teacher, I only see the students in my own groups, this works as expected

With highest regards,

Sam

As I teach in an environment where all members of staff can see all groups, I'd forgotten about the situation whereby they should only see certain groups.

It should be an easy fix to only show students from the relevant group(s) when 'separate groups' is set and 'view all groups' is not set (however it might be a little while before I can get on to that, as I'm currently trying to replace my development PC after the motherboard died yesterday morning).

If you were able to add it as a bug to tracker.moodle.org (in the contrib / package:checklist categories ) then that would be a helpful reminder for me.

To update, the latest version of the checklist block (updated a few seconds ago) now correctly handles the list of students in the situation where:

separate groups are set
the teacher does not have the capability 'accessallgroups'

I hope that all works for your now.

Hi Davo,

I have a feature request which I hope you will be able to fulfil. I would very much like to be able to have an instance of the checklist-block on the frontpage (or the my-page for that matter) where the student can see the progress for all checklists in the different courses he/she is enrolled in.

The (simplified) usecase could be:

Student logs into Moodle
Student sees the (global) checklist block which shows all the checklists for that student below each other (with course name and progress bar)
The student clicks on a specific checklist and is redirected to the progress overview in the that course (just as it works now)

I'm looking forward to your ideas on this feature.

Regards,

Sam

Certainly possible, but it comes down to the time I have to add such a feature.

If you add a tracker request for it, I'll certainly consider it, once I have got through all the other items I need to do (including getting ready for the UK Moodle Moot next week and finalising the update to my UploadPDF plugin).

BTW, if the student visits the 'My Moodle' page, they already get an overview of all of the checklists - I know its not in a 'block' format, but it might do until I have time to implement this version.

Our company is very thankful to your plugin and i am wondering if it's possible to add a button that sends an email to teachers upon checklist completion ?

This is going to make your plugin the best plugin in the world.

Can you do that?

Thank you so much!

Email on completion is certainly possible (and has been requested once already).

I can add it to the list of things to do, but I've got quite a bit of contract work on just at the moment (or coming up in the near future, on the back of the UK Moodle Moot), so some of my free plugin support may take a bit longer.

I have another question!

i set my checklist to update by TEACHER ONLY, the grades get updated in the gradebook no problem. but when i try to export the checklist to see what was ticked-off all the items are empty ?? i understand that it shows what was ticked off by students, but in my case only the teacher can update it choosing YES/NO, when the teacher is done with the checklists of his students. he goes to the gradebook and like i said the grades are there but if he tries to export it to see what he ticked off unfortunately all the fields are empty! PLEASE Help ME with this issue as i already introduced alot of people to your AMAZING PLUGIN and we really appreciate what you do.

Thank you

Exporting teacher yes/no responses should be a very quick one to do.

I'll see if I can get it done soon.

Davo - are you answering Moodle questions during presentations at #mootuk11? Disgraceful!

Thank you so much ! i can'T wait to see it happen!!!

Any updates about exporting teacher yes/no responses showing in report export checklist ?

i believe it's a quick one to do as well but i am not that much of coding person..

Thank you!

OHH i thought it was just me that could'nt export teacher marks for some reasons but now i see that this is an issue hmmmm!

John did you get an answer from Davo about this issue yet????

Please let me know as soon as possible.

Marry.

Hey everyone, give me a chance - expecting a fix within 48 hours, when I've been away at a Moodle conference (as mentioned in one of the other posts), is a bit of a tight schedule

Adding teacher marks to the export is next on my list, so I'm hoping to complete it and push it out today, but no promises (and it *is* a public holiday here ...)

go Davo , Go

Just to let you know - the fixed export (with teacher marks included as Y/N for yes/no) is now released.

I am Excited !!! where do i download it Davo ?

Ok i downloaded it from your website AWESOME !! you are a genius davo!

as soon as you are not busy and i really wish you a good luck hun!

Now if you get this plugin to send notifications i will give you a hug from south africa hehehe geezzzzz

Marry!

Thank you very much !

Does anyone know if the checklist has this option or not ?

* Single input

*Multiple input

J Samuel

You will have to explain what you want these options to do, before I can answer that.

When the teacher checks YES and saves it saves.

If he tries to edit it later i want it to restrict him from changing that yes to no. in other words once a yes always a yes until the superior checks the report of his teachers.

@John - the 'once set can only be changed by a supervisor' functionality is fairly specialised and would represent a few hours work (adding the option to control it, disabling the yes/no buttons, checking permissions, making sure it works with M1.9 & M2.0). I can add it to the list, but as we have just started a new college term, it is likely to be several weeks before I have a suitable time slot to complete this (there are a number of features that I want to sort out in my plugins which will take a higher priority at the moment).

The tracker issue is here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2892 if you want to follow it

Great module! We've been looking for something like this to help our employees keep track of their progress but I've run across a challenge.

Here is my scenario: we have multiple employees who are responsible for different activites within the course. I want to be able to create a single checklist and then customize it to track only certain items for each employee based on their responsibilities.

I've played with creating a checklist for each employee and then locally assigning 'student' with 'view hidden' rights. This works but the teacher view shows all participants for every checklist. As well, I would need to add multiple course blocks and that is not quite feasible. The Groups function would work nicely if, when set to groups, it let me customize the checklist for each group much like a Wiki (but it currently does not allow this, right?)

Any suggestions?

Not yet as far as i know!

This is my Top Fav plugin in the the whole Moodle plugins database.

it's missing few things like notifications or ability to submit once / multyple other than that it takes a pretty big brain to make something like so and one more time.. i appreciate your job davo and Keep going !!

BTW The 'email on complete' request is in tracker here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2770 if you want to watch it.

@Todd - Two ways to get a little closer to what you want:

1. Use groupings ( http://docs.moodle.org/en/Groupings ) - this will allow you to show the checklist to only one grouping and (as far as I can remember, I haven't tested this much) will only show the members of that grouping for that checklist.

2. Similar to your approach, but only assign the role 'mod/checklist:updateown' to the students who you want to see in a report (the report uses this capability to draw-up the list of students to display).

Aside from that, I can look into adding the 'different checklist for each group' functionality, but it's likely to be a day's work, so (with my teaching term starting today and a number of bits of freelance programming work to complete), it is likely to be several weeks before I can start on it.

I've added a tracker item for this, in case you want to watch it: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2893

I want the teacher to select YES or NO and no blank option, because in our company the teacher has to finish all checklist with yes and no before he submits to his Superior. is there anyway i can remove that blank option ?

Search for this line in mod/checklist/locallib.php:

echo '<option value="'.$item->id.':'.CHECKLIST_TEACHERMARK_UNDECIDED.'" '.$selu.'></option>';

If you delete that line (or add // at the start of the line to tell the server to ignore it), then the 'undecided' option will not be available.

Can we have the comments in a drop down menu instead of a text field input ?

i personaly think it's gonna make it easy on the teacher to submit comments when he has more than 200 students in the system.

something like Good job/ Not Good enough! in a drop down menu

so we don't have to type it more than 200 times. Thanks Davo!

This is not something I really want to do - whilst it might make it a bit easier for you, it is going to make the functionality very restrictive for anyone else who is using the system.

If you really want to do this on your local install, then open up mod/checklist/locallib.php and find this line:

echo '<input type="text" name="teachercomment['.$item->id.']" value="'.s($comment->text).'" />';

You will need to replace it with something like this (and I'm writing off the top of my head, so this is untested):

echo '<select name="teachercomment['.$item->id.']">';
echo '<option value="Good job">Good job</option>';
echo '<option value="Not good enough!">Not good enough!</option>';
echo '</select>';

(This may not show the teacher which item they selected, so it might need some additional code adding).

it still doesn't show drop down menu... it shows me just the text field as before.

You'll also need to replace the second 'name="teachercomment[' line about 4 lines further down in the code.

Again, this is an untested (and basically unsupported) modification, so I can't promise it will keep on working (and it will certainly be lost if you install a new version of the checklist over the top).

Davo my friend ! i looked everywhere for a block that shows how many days left a user has untill the course end date in moodle! (course expiry date) and it doesn't exist, someone made a block before but the link stopped working and nobody could get a hold of him since 2009. is this something you can make Davo?

The reason i asked is because i really appreciate you and the brain god gave you !

Please say yes!

It is possible for me to make a block that could be configured with course end date and display the number of days left until that date. It wouldn't take that long to do, but making a custom block is something I would have to charge for (I'm happy to give away and support plugins that I've already created for my own use, but when it's for someone else ...).

If you are still interested, please contact me via the Moodle messaging system and we can discuss further.

I've set up our checklists where updates are only made by teachers and teacher can add comments. Currently, when students view the checklist they see teacher comments in the following format:

UserID: "comment"

I'd like for the checklist to display the comment only and not display the userid. I'm not very familiar with php code. After doing a bit of searching it appears I need to modify the locallib.php file however I see numerous instances of userid. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Todd

You don't mention which Moodle version you are using, so this is the fix for Moodle 2.0 (it is pretty much identical to the Moodle 1.9 version, but the moodle_url line will be slightly different).

In locallib.php, find this bunch of lines (around line 920):

if ($comment->commentby) {
$userurl = new moodle_url('/user/view.php', array('id'=>$comment->commentby, 'course'=>$this->course->id) ); echo '<a href="'.$userurl.'">'.fullname($commentusers[$comment->commentby]).'</a>: ';
}

To remove the username, either delete all of these lines, or just add // at the start of the 'echo' line, so that it now reads:

//echo '<a href="'.$userurl.'">'.fullname($commentusers[$comment->commentby]).'</a>: ';

Obviously, this is something you will have to manually change, whenever I release a new version of the code.

Thanks Davo! I'm using Moodle 1.9. Made the modifications as you suggested and works like a charm.

One final question: Currently the "View Progress" tab in a checklist automatically defaults to display all items in the checklist. Is there a way for this tab to default to the view of progress bars AND only required items?

Changing the defaults is not a 30 second fix, based on the way I have implemented it, but a workaround would be to add the view you prefer to your browser favourites, so you can get to it quickly.

If you add a request for configurable defaults to http://tracker.moodle.org then I'll try to get onto it when I have some free time (do you want them configurable at the site level, or individually for each checklist?).

Will do. Since I'm using multiple checklists it would be nice to have configurable defaults at the site level however either way will work out just fine.

Many thanks in advance!

Just a quick update - the 'cron' job that automatically updates checklists as the user completes activities now uses a lot less DB queries (this is especially true if you use very few or no automatically updating checklists on your site).

Any new features planed to be possibly added to your checklist work ?

'email teachers on checklist completion' is nearly done (with a couple of minor bugs still to fix), after that I'll either have a look through the tracker bugs list (for this & my other plugins), or start work on another plugin (or two) I've got in the pipeline.

Later in the week I've got some marking to do and some contract work (which I'm awaiting further information on, hence having a little spare time to work on my own plugins). Will have to wait and see what I get done ...

Thanks Davo! Best of luck to you man !!!!

To keep everyone up to date - 'email teachers on checklist completion' is now available. It is off by default (you need to switch it on in the settings for each checklist. You can control who gets the emails with the capability: 'mod/checklist:emailoncomplete' (by default - teachers & non-editing teachers).

Let me know if there are any problems (this feature has only been tested on my development servers so far).

In the pipeline: import / export checklist items via CSV files (M1.9 version is done, but not released yet; M2.0 version is unstarted).

Thank you soooooooooooooooooo Much for this amazing develpment!

CSV Import / Export is now available for the checklist plugin (if you create a checklist then click 'Export', then that should give you a pretty clear idea of what is needed in for the 'Import' file).

Also a few odds and ends of fixes - checklists without any 'required' items no longer give errors with debugging on (not that I'd recommend using checklists without required items, as that doesn't really match the purpose of the checklist plugin). Gradebook updates (and completion emails) now work when using Oracle for your Moodle database.

Hallo Davo,
I have a problem with the updates of the checklist.

This is, what the checklist looks before the update.
"Show course modules in checklist" is "Yes"

modul

And another picture:

After the update it looks like this:

All is gone!

Here you can see, the "eye" is missing for hiding/unhiding.

This Problem I had also on an earlier version, that all was gone,
and I put in all courses a new checklist.
But this time, when I make a new checklist with "Show course modules in checklist" = "Yes"
it looks still like the picture above with no "eyes".

Another point is, that I can`t change the "Grade to complete".
If I change the number, the browser starts to load the page again, and I can`t save the changes.

I don`t know, if I´m alone with this problem.

Nevertheless, it`s still my favourite Modul and Block.

Idoetz

PS: Moodle Version 1.9

I've just checked in a small fix that might be related to the problem you were seeing with the page reloading (download a new copy and it will have the fix).

The items that are crossed out are activities that are hidden in the course, so they won't appear on the checklist until you unhide them. This is by design, as students should not be able to see even the title of activities that a teacher has hidden.

Hello, is it possible to add the option to lock the checklist when the teacher aproves it? this way the student can't go back and change it after it's approved by his teacher.

i think it's still missing the confirm button from the teacher side.

This is a wonderful and the best job out there in moodleand we are just trying to give ideas to approve it so please don't get me wrong.

the student will go and do the yes/no for each element in the checklist .

the teacher will check the student answers and if he likes it then he will confirm somehow that will make tgis checklist locked completly in the student side. if the teacher is not satisfied you already put that add a comment button that does this job which is amazing!!

Just something to think about..

Thank you in advance Davo! Great Work !!

Please could you add this request (a teacher 'lock/unlock' button) to tracker.moodle.org (under: new feature, non-core contributed; Package: checklist).

I will have a look through the tracker issues when I next have some free time (which won't be for a week or two, at least).

Hallo Davo, thanks for your answer. It works now. The activities are hidden, because all authenticated users can go to all courses. I gave the students the permission to see the hidden activities but not the authenticated user. I have to change that. No problem. Thanks again for your wonderfull work. Ralf

If you want activities to show on the checklist, but be hidden from non-enroled users, then you might want to try putting all the students into a grouping and making the activities only available to students in the grouping (there is a slight performance hit associated with this, but it shouldn't be too bad).

In case you aren't familiar with groupings, you can find them here:

http://docs.moodle.org/19/en/Groupings

Done! i finished the trucker.

Thank you!

Salut Tous le monde / Hello

This is amazin block MERCI !!

i agree with john very much. the teacher can lock it will be good, let's say teacher chose Yes, this part of checklist will turn hidden in student login or change that part from black to red ...i think anything to make student understand that this element in checklist is approved will be greet !

DAVO MERCI TRES TRES FORT, J'AIME TON TRAVAIL!! BRAVO

Hi Davo,

Firstly congratulations on the module checklist, used extensively in our courses.
Recently migrated to Moodle 1.9 -> 2.x and we observe that the module checklist does not have the option "grade to complete" for this version. Is there any way to activate it? For example: we want on a quiz, only the student has completed the activity after achieving a certain minimum grade score.

Thanks for the help.

Wagner Tadeu

The checklist now uses the Moodle completion system to define the rules for when different activities are counted as 'complete', as this allows for much greater flexibility about how each activity defines those rules. I had always assumed that the quiz module would include a completion criteria for 'mark complete when grade is above X', but it doesn't appear to have that feature.

I suggest that you have a look through tracker.moodle.org and see if that has been requested as a feature and see if it will be implemented (or open a new request, if it isn't there already).

Davo, I'm still using the Checklist module and I think the progress bar does help with overall completion rates.

One issue I'm having is that I typically use a lot of Orphaned Activities in my course design method so students aren't faced with a long list of resources and activities. In an effort to try and automate my checklists, I created a checklist with course items and it does not included orphaned activities.

It seems to me that I tested this back in July and was able to work around this by opening all of the topics in my course and have my checklist auto-created by Show course modules/save/and then edit settings to change that setting back to No. It broke the link to the activity/resource itself but the items were still in the checklist. This part still works.

I tested it with some student data and it appears that the checklist did still fill in automatically depending on the Activity Completion settings. Now when I try it I'm unable to recreate the effect.

Any plans to make the Whole course setting apply to Orphaned Activities? It seems like people could always edit their checklists and hide any items they really didn't want to appear.

Hopefully most of that made sense,

Jon

The algorithm I use to populate the checklist with the sections is to loop from 1 to number of sections, updating the checklist with the items found there.

Without quite a bit of messing around with the way this works (which I'm very unwilling to do, as the code is quite fiddly and could be easily broken) I either stop at the declared number of sections or I ask the code to loop for ever, in the off-chance that it might find another section at some point (I'm assuming you can see why this might be a bad idea). If anyone wants to adjust the code and then provide me with proof that they've tested it with a great variety of different scenarios, then I'd be happy to integrate a patch for this.

The code for the 'cron' function that looks for checkmarks to be updated only includes checklists with 'auto populate' and 'auto complete' enabled. Due to a minor bug, if you have made the code modification listed in the install instructions (to enable instant updates, without waiting for cron to run), then it only checks for checklists with 'auto complete' enabled - it ignores the 'auto populate' setting. This may be why your checklists were still updating on a test server (but this is not the intended behaviour, so I may remember to fix it at some point).

Thanks for the detailed response. Would it cause a performance issue if it looped from sections 1 to 52? This would likely be the most number of sections one might install in a course (even though a course with that many sections would probably break all kinds of best practices rules).

Do you know which file I might try to edit to have it look in more sections than those found in the course settings?

Looping from sections 1 to 52 would mean that anyone with 53 course sections would be filing a bug report with me to say that the last section wasn't appearing in their checklist. The correct solution is to ask Moodle how many sections there are and then use that number (which is what I do at the moment).

Orphaned sections are not a Moodle feature, they are the side effect of a broken situation, which just happens to be helpful in certain situations. It would also seem to me that the only reason to deliberately put items into an orphaned section would be hide them from students. In which case, having them show up in a checklist would appear to be exactly the opposite of what is wanted.

You are free to look at the code in mod/checklist/locallib.php, function update_items_from_course() it may be simple to fix it to do what you want.

Hi Davo,

Adding activities as 'orphaned' hides the original listing of them, but still leaves the activities themselves available from links (icons etc) so rather than hiding the activity from students compeltely, it allows different methods of presenting the activities - links within the text in an earlier section, graphical/icon links etc. So it maybe that those 'orphaned activities' do need to be included in the checklist, while 'hidden' activities (hidden using the eye icon) would not as those are truly hidden from students.

Not sure, but something that may need thinking about or comments from others who use the checklist and orphaned activities in these ways?

Richard

Thanks, I'll see if I can come up with anything by searching around and report back here should I have any success. I thought that 52 was the default number of topics allowed by a default Moodle installation.

I've made my career off of this "broken situation" with the courses I develop and teach:

http://moodleshare.org/course/view.php?id=2 http://moodleshare.org/course/view.php?id=6 http://moodleshare.org/course/view.php?id=51

In terms of why someone would want to do this... I find that it is helpful for courses where all of the content must be open for users and I don't want to overwhelm them with how many items there are for them to complete, not to mention, defeat the scroll of death while keeping design in mind.

Hi

This looks like a great module but I can't seem to get it to run properly. I have Moodle 1.9.1 The installation of Checklist seems to work fine but when I add it as an activity and the click on it I just get 500 Internal Server Error.

Any ideas ?

Please make sure you put MOD folder in the MOD folder in your server..

It could be a mistake I've made, but the most likely explanation is the file permissions. First try downloading the files again, that usually fixes such problems. After that see what is written in your server logs (under Linux look in /var/log/apache2/error.log, not sure where windows stores its logs).

Thanks guys for taking the trouble to reply. I reinstalled but get the same issue.

The error logs :

[Sun Jun 12 08:34:31 2011] [error] [client 83.67.63.78] File does not exist: /home/stlouisg/public_html/thecareersroom.com/500.shtml, referer: http://***********view.php?id=4

[Sun Jun 12 08:34:31 2011] [error] [client 83.67.63.78] SoftException in Application.cpp:256: File "/home/stlouisg/public_html/thecareersroom.com/MOODLE/mod/checklist/view.php" is writeable by group, referer: http://***********view.php?id=4

The problem appears to be that the file view.php us not read only on the server. Remove the group write permission and it should work.

Thanks. That seems to have fixed it !

Hello Maria! i actualy like your idea, once the teacher clicks on yes and have the option to change the colour to red/green/.. that would be nice but davo said he is pretty busy and hopefuly he will have alook at the locking feature soon.

Much Appreciated Davo

In addition to the Save and Save and Next buttons on the individual apprentice summary page, could we add a ‘Submit’ button which sends an auto-email? i believe this will be very usefull to pick when to send the notification manualy as well.

Thanks

Thanks for this block, Davo. It is ALMOST just what we were looking for.

Do you have any plans to modify it so that in a same checklist a system role ( exp: teachers) can update an element while a different system role ( non editing teachers) can be Read only ?

My example:

(yes/no) element 1

(yes/no) element 2 Could this element show (yes/ no) for teachers only and not to Non-editing teachers ?

(yes/no) element 3

(yes/no) element 4

@Tim

You can get pretty close to that behaviour at the moment - if you allow the 'mod/checklist:viewreports' capability, but not the 'mod/checklist:updateother', then you can see, on the report, all the checklist marks, but not change the marks.

This does not allow you to view a single student's marks, just the list of all of them at once.

It should not be that difficult to allow the viewing of a single student's marks, but it's not something I'm going to have time to do anytime soon (I'm just taking on a large development project and I've committed any available time to that, for the forseeable future).

If you add it to the tracker issues for the checklist, then I'll remember to look into it, when I next have time.

I Knew i could do that one, i just thought to ask if you have that option yet but thank you for explaining anyways..

Hi Tim, i am still thinking of a way to lock the checklist after being reviewed by teacher ? any work arround ideas guys?

Thanks

Tried on Moodle sites, one is Moodle2.0, the other one is Moodle2.1, both on PHP 5.3.6 and MySql5.0.5. But, none is working, shown as no databse, so nothing to install.

Is it because the PHP5.3.6?

I've been using the Checklist on my Moodle1.9, it is still working fine now.

Anyone tried this on PHP5.3x?

I wouldn't have thought that the PHP version would make a difference (unless it has stopped you from installing any other plugins?)

I've just double-checked the download and all of the necessary files are there and (as far as I can tell), working fully.

The most likely problem is file permissions - try downloading the files again, unzipping them, uploading them to the server and then carefully check that the server has read & execute permissions on all the folders (especially mod/checklist/db), as well as read persmission on all the files.

Please Davo Find us a solution for this locking issue you ve got what it takes to establish it. hehe

something like this would be great and i promise we will leave you alone lol

(Yes/No) this is a demo [ lock] option

John - this is a feature that is perfectly possible to add. It is listed in tracker here: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2980

If you 'watch' the tracker report, then you will get notified as and when I next have some spare time to work on the checklist plugin and implement this feature.

Repeatedly asking for this feature on the Moodle forums will not increase the amount of spare time I have to implement it.

I have been using the checklist module for a couple of weeks now and my students and I really like it. However, I'm wondering if we can use a date stamp button for teachers to use after clicking the Yes or No to keep track of when that competency was graded ?

Thanks.

The dates are recorded, but not displayed anywhere. When I next have some free time, it should be fairly quick to add an option to display the information. Please can you add a tracker issue for this request and I'll look into it when I can. Davo

Thanks David.

I'm sorry David i don't know how to do a tracker, i hope you would just remember.

Thanks.

Sorry, I have too many requests, for various different plugins, to be able to remember them all.If you visit tracker.moodle.org you can create an account. Once that is done, click on create issue, select contributed module and new feature. On the next screen, fill in the details of what you want (the module is package: checklist, in this case). As the reporter of the issue, you will automatically receive emails when the issue is updated, if you want to be updated on other issues, then you need to click on watch.

^{Sorry, It was my fault. I was too eager on testing Moodle2.0/2.1 on the latest PHP5.3.6. Rather than upload the files into the correct mod/block/export folder, I uploaded whole folder into /mod. Oops.}

^{Now, the Checklists are working beautifully on my Moodle1.9, 2.0 and 2.1, under PHP5.2.17 and 5.3.6.}

^Thanks

Good day sir.

You did a wonderful Job David. i have two issues to address:

me and my college are both teachers, and when we use the comments button, it overrides the previous comment. we both tried to change the code to add comments next to eachother instead of overriding eachother's comments. No luck ! what can you do! we are not good enough in php haha

we believe it has something to do with this part:

Could you please advise.

$foundcomment = false;
                if ($comments) {
                    if (array_key_exists($item->id, $comments)) {
                        $comment = $comments[$item->id];
                        $foundcomment = true;
                        echo ' <span class="teachercomment"> ';
                        if ($comment->commentby) {
                            echo '<a href="'.$CFG->wwwroot.'/user/view.php?id='.$comment->commentby.'&course='.$this->course->id.'">'.fullname($commentusers[$comment->commentby]).'</a>: ';
                        }
                        if ($editcomments) {
                            echo '<input type="text" name="teachercomment['.$item->id.']" value="'.s($comment->text).'" />';
                        } else {
                            echo s($comment->text);
                        }
                        echo ' </span>';
                    }
                }
                if (!$foundcomment && $editcomments) {
                    echo ' <input type="text" name="teachercomment['.$item->id.']" />';
                }

Second issue is : you know how when we click on add End date button and you see the date on the right side of each sentence ?

It is going to be very helpful to use the same button by default to show date when we do yes and no. because we have 3 reviews a year and time stamp will be SUPER to make difference

Hi Chung, can you please vote here with us to have the lock option in checklist ?

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-2980

Thank you

will do.

There is a maximum of 1 comment per item per user. If two teachers both wish to make a comment, then I sugges the easiest solution is to edit the first comment and add the new comment beside it (put your initials in brackets afterwards, if you need to distinguish between the comments).

Adding the ability to track different comments from different teachers would be quite a big job as I will also need to distinguish between adding new comments and editing old comments (and would teahers be allowed to edit / delete each other's comments?).

I will see if I can add dates - but not today, as it's the first day of the summer holidays and I need a break.

Hi Davo,

I am currently using the "progress bar" module but thinking of switching to your checklist module, especially because the bar also appears in the "my courses overview".

I understand that the checklist gets automatically updated, if the file autoupate.php has been run (assuming correctly defined settings). Now 2 questions:

1. wouldn't it be maybe better, to check the progress only when a user opens a bage with a checklist? I could imagine that if there are many users in an installation it costs quite a lot of ressources to do it the existing way.

2. Why do you pre-define completion settings in the autoupdate.php and not just take the ones which the user defined for the related activity?

Greetings,

Flotter

1. Doing it that way would involve running a search through all the log files and grades every time a teacher viewed a report page, or a user viewed a checklist, or a user viewed a course page with the checklist block, or any one of a number of different situations in the code. The question is - do you want the updates running quitely in the background in a separate process, or do you want to interrupt the page rendering to do a large number of updates 'on demand'?

(as an aside - if you want the updates to happen immediately, then there are two very small core modificaitons that can be made, which cause the checklist updates to happen at the same time as the activities are completed).

2. I'm not sure what you mean by the 'user defined' completion settings. As far as I am aware Moodle 1.9 does not have any such thing and in Moodle 2.0 that is exactly what I *do* use (unless it is switched off for the site or not enabled for a particular module, in which case I need my own code to make a 'best guess' at what should be considered completion).

Hi Davo,

thanks for your fast and clear reply.

@1: Yes, the trade-off is clear to me. I am just asking because I think the progress bar module does it the way without using a scheduled task (if I see it right ). And I was wondering if such update every minute will influence the performance of a system with many user.

@2: Sorry for the un-clear question. I was only talking about 2.0 and I was not aware that you actually do it this way. And another sorry - I misunderstood how your mod is working: I thought it ignores the contitins which have been set for the related activities and just uses the ones in the autoupdate.php

Thank you for the really great work!

Flotter

1. The length of time the update takes is dependent on home many log entries (or completion entries) have been generated since the last time the update ran. There are also benefits in terms of being able to load quite a bit of the data (such as the list of checklists), just once in the update. If you are looking at a busy site, then the chances are that the number of users online would cause complete updates much more often than once a minute, if I had to rescan all the completion / log / grade data every time any of the course / checklist pages were refreshed. Besides, if you are really worried, you can always reduce the cron frequency and only update every 5 min (although this will cause each update to take longer and may cause confusion about how long it takes to 'check-off' items). In experiments, it is the updating of the checklist, when an item needs checking-off that takes the most DB queries, not the scanning of the logs / completion records. Checking-off items is going to be a similar-sized hit whenever it is calculated.

2. No problem

Thank you... thank you i will be checking this discussion page everyday to see the news about the time stamp. you're the best

YAY ! i'm Excited already

Sorry to get your hopes up - I still haven't had any time to work on my checklist plugin and, taking into account my upcoming holiday and the preparations for it, I'm unlikely to have time to do anything in the next 2-3 weeks.

Looking at the threading of this conversation, you appear to have jumped into the middle of a discussion about the 'automatic checking-off of items', and interpreted it it as being in response to something you wrote earlier.

Please be aware that I would love to add many of these requested features, but they are entirely dependent on me finding time and energy to do so, when not looking after my children (especially during the summer holidays), planning for lessons in September, completing Moodle projects that I am being employed to work on and grabbing a few minutes rest, after a long year's teaching.

I completely understand Daid, thank you loads for everything you have done so far! the why i am excited about the time stamp is because it's going it will solve my issue concerning when i click yes or no to show the time next to it.

Thank you once more and please enjoy time with your family, we can wait untill you have some time.

Hi Davo,

Just wanted to say many thanks for this wonderful module - it's (almost!) exactly what we've been looking for. I have a quick question about using Checklist with none core Moodle modules - including the UploadPDF assignment type you've also very kindly contributed to the community. Basically, I would like to have Checklist tick off when students have completed these none core modules (even if it's just a simple view which constitutes the completion criteria). I've amended the list of module types in Checklist's autoupdate.php file to include the following:

<code>

        (($module == 'survey') && ($action == 'submit'))
        || (($module == 'quiz') && ($action == 'close attempt'))
        || (($module == 'forum') && (($action == 'add post')||($action == 'add discussion')))
        || (($module == 'resource') && ($action == 'view'))
        || (($module == 'hotpot') && ($action == 'submit'))
        || (($module == 'wiki') && ($action == 'edit'))
        || (($module == 'checklist') && ($action == 'complete'))
        || (($module == 'choice') && ($action == 'choose'))
        || (($module == 'lams') && ($action == 'view'))
        || (($module == 'scorm') && ($action == 'view'))
        || (($module == 'assignment') && ($action == 'upload'))
        || (($module == 'journal') && ($action == 'add entry'))
        || (($module == 'lesson') && ($action == 'end'))
        || (($module == 'realtimequiz') && ($action == 'submit'))
        || (($module == 'workshop') && ($action == 'submit'))
        || (($module == 'glossary') && ($action == 'add entry'))
        || (($module == 'data') && ($action == 'add'))
        || (($module == 'chat') && ($action == 'talk'))
        || (($module == 'feedback') && ($action == 'submit')) // Settings for additional modules in use added below
       || (($module == 'lightboxgallery') && ($action == 'view'))
       || (($module == 'turnitintool') && ($action == 'view'))
       || (($module == 'bigbluebutton') && ($action == 'view'))
       || (($module == 'questionnaire') && ($action == 'submit'))
       || (($module == 'scheduler') && ($action == 'view'))

</code>

As mentioned, in addition we're also using your own UploadPDF, as well as Peer Review (http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=3915&filter=1) assignment types. Out of the additional modules indicated above, LightBoxGallery is getting correctly ticked off, as is Questionnaire. However, even with their completion criteria set to 'view', BigBlueButton, TurnItIn and Scheduler don't get ticked off - while UploadPDF and Peer Review also don't complete.

Is there anything obvious I'm missing?

Many thanks again for a wonderful module and for any support you're able to offer.

Take a look at the course logs, if there is san entry there that matches the criteria you've added, then it should get checked off the next time the checklist cron job runs. If there is not a suitable log entry, then the plugin swell need to be modified to create the log entry. Note, in M2.0 you can use completion inst..ead, if that t helps

Many thanks for the speedy reply - very much appreciated (especially with everything else you seem to have going on!). I've had a look through the course log which, among others, shows the following entries:

As you can see, there's an entry for 'lightboxgallery view' which results in that activity being correctly ticked off as completed; however, there's also the entry for 'turnitintool view' which, in theory, should trigger completion based on the criteria I've set up in autoupdate.php, but doesn't. Additionally, the 'assignment upload' entry relates to an UploadPDF assignment - but again this doesn't trigger completion. BTW, we've also implemented the core modifications to remove the 60-second delay in completion display.

I certainly don't want to distract you from other, more pressing issues - but really would appreciate any insight you might have, as we'd love to make Checklist available to users in the next semester (but could only do so if it supports completion of all activities).

Many thanks again.

PS - sorry, forgot to mention: Moodle 1.9.9, WAMP

*Update*

Bit of a weird one this...but both the UploadPDF and Peer Review assignments are now correctly triggering completion. Only thing is, I haven't changed anything... Maybe there's some other cron-triggered process which needs to run in order for them to work properly with Checklist? Also just realised that BigBlueButton thows up a 'join' action in terms of what goes into the log; have corrected this in my autoupdate.php file, but unfortunately it still doesnt trigger completion.

I can reply whilst my wife takes over the holiday driving for a bit (but can't access the code!) The best I can suggest for debugging this is to write some data out to a log file - $fp = fopen($CFG->dataroot.'/debug.log', 'a+'); fwrite($fp, "module $mod action $action\n"); Then a bit later: fwrite($fp, "update checklist\n"); // or 'no update' as appropriate fclose($fp); If you play around with similar code, you should be able to tweak down where it it's going wrong.

Any news about the locking option Davo?

Enjoy da holidays!

this is a great plugin and i have been using it for a while. Is there any chance of adding a 3rd option of part complete. some thing that would show up on the students screen a s part complete but would not increase the students level of progression.

It would certainly be possible to add a 'partially complete' mark, but there are quite a few places where changes would need to be made to accomodate this (including a new icon to display, new translation text, a new option in the dropdown and changing the report / view checklist screens).

Please add this as an issue to tracker.moodle.org (under contributed modules, package:checklist) and I will look into it when I have a chance (but expect to have to wait for several weeks, or longer).

Hi Davo,

hi all,

I have an idea which also goes into the direction of indicating the partly completion of an acitivity.

For most activities, there are several conditions which can be chosen to be releavnt for overall activity completion:

Conditions for assignment activity "File Upload"

What do you think of showing all conditions which have been ticked by the admin in the checklist? Besides the overall completion of an activity, the "sub activities" would appear, which I think has similar effect like indicating partly completion (but without the need for additional translation etc.).

Above case is only interesting for the case where the checklist is build automatically based on the activities of the course/section.

For the case that the checklist is created manually, a workarround could be to divide checklist items.

Looking forward to your comments,

Flotter

@Flotter - that sounds like an interesting idea, but first of all, I'm not quite sure if there is anything exposed by the completion API to tell my checklist plugin about 'partial completion'. Secondly, I really don't have any time to implement such a feature. I'm hoping to grab a spare evening or two, at some point, to implement some of the other quick features that have been requested, but I think this one would make it onto the list (although I'm more than happy to accept well-written patches, if there are any developers out there who want to implement this, or any of the other features!).

I think the one thing I would be interested in implementing, related to this, would be to not tick-off items that had been completed, but not gained the pass mark.

Hi again Davo.

Many thanks for the reply - especially considering you're literally on the road...! I really do appreciate you taking the time to help, and think I'm getting closer. Unfortunately, my programming and PHP skills are not the greatest, so I wasn't sure what to do with the code you provided above. However, I did take a direct look through our log tables and noticed that the offending entries (i.e. 'bigbluebutton join' and 'turnitintool view') are always accompanied by a cmid value of zero - while those which successfully trigger completion show a value greater than this.

I also noticed that near the top of autoupdate.php is the line...

if ($cmid == 0 || $userid == 0) { return 0; }

...which (I can only guess) might mean that log entries with an associated cmid value of zero are ignored by Checklist's update mechanism. Could this be the problem?

Once again, I'd genuinely be grateful for any help you might be able to offer (and please don't worry: it can wait until you back off your hols!)

Best wishes.

Without a course module id (cmid), I have no way of matching the log entry to the checklist item associated with it. Someone will need to fix the logging within these plugins, before they will work with the checklist automatic updates.

Hi again Davo,

Many thanks for your reply - and apologies for the lateness of my own (have just returned from vacation).

If possible, could I PM you about this issue to discuss (possibly financially-assisted) solutions? I've just realised that RealtimeQuiz also doesn't get picked up by Checklist (despite it having a 'realtimequiz' 'submit' entry in an unmodified version of autoupdate.php). Again, to have Checklist pick up all of our modules is really what we're after - and we'd very much appreciate any support you could give us with this.

Best wishes.

I'm happy to discuss, but I can't take on any contract work at the moment, as I've already dedicated all my development time to a large project (and I've also started back at college today, so lesson prep will eat into my time as well).

I'm happy to offer what help I can, but I can't make any promises. You can email me at davo AT davodev DOT co DOT uk, if you want to disucss off the forum.

Greetings Davo,

This plugin is exactly what I have been looking for. You have obviously done a lot of excellent work on this.

I have installed it and added a checklist activity to a course. The resources and activities are set up with 2.0's completion requirements, and are getting ticked off as students complete them. However, the checklist progress bar is not automatically updating, even after cron runs.

Here's a screenshot of the progress report (the items colored green are ones that I manually updated).

Have I missed something simple in the setup? Thanks very much,

Dan

@Daniel Wright: You have set up a 'student & teacher' checklist.

The teacher has not ticked-off the items, so they are not considered 'official' (so the progress bar is not updated).

If you want the progress bar to update as soon as the 'student' has checked them off (by completing the activity), then you need to set it to 'student only'.

Great - I made that change and it works perfectly. Thanks for the very fast response!

One more question Davo - is there a way to keep the checklist from considering an item complete if the student does not achieve a passing grade on it?

In our case, I have course completion criteria set so that a student must achieve an 80% on a specific quiz in order to complete the course. Currently, the checklist updates to 100% complete even if the student fails to achieve a passing grade on the quiz. Can I set a passing grade on an item in the checklist?

Thanks,
Dan

If completion is enabled for an activity, then the checklist uses whatever criteria you have set for the completion.

Sadly, 'achieving a particular grade' is not one of the available criteria (I've just added a tracker issue - MDL-28703 - about this). The best I can offer, in this case, is that you create a simple page resource ('Well done on completing the quiz!') that is hidden until the correct grade is achieved, which is considered 'complete' once the student has viewed it.

Thanks Davo - I thought this was probably the case. As you've noted, the completion criteria only allow you to set a "receive a grade" on the quiz itself, and the passing grade is set through in the Gradebook. I agree that this is a bit clumsy, and has been hard to explain to teachers creating courses!

I like your clever workaround suggestion. We include an optional certificate at the end of the course which are only available if the student achieves a passing grade. I could probably make the certificate mandatory and basically achieve the same result as your suggestion.

Thanks again for the excellent work and quick responses.

Dan

Hi Great module but i'm wondering if the functionality of exporting time stamps in the CSV file is there?

No, there are no timestamps in the CSV export.

Should be fairly easy to add, but will have to wait until I have time to do so.

To help me to remember to do this, when I have time, could you add it to tracker.moodle.org ?

Roger that: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-3118

Thanks

Wonderful! thank Davo for the time stamps ! i am having a problem though please look ar the picture attached

Yes that looks as expected, I can't line the dates up without them potentially overlapping the text of the items. In the moodle 2 version, I've added a background colour, so you can read the timestamps more clearly.I'll add that to the moodle 1.9 version when I get a moment (it's a 2-line fix).

I've now added the background colour to the date list on the Moodle 1.9 version.

I've checked in quite a number of updates to the checklist over the weekend (but it'll probably be quite some time before I make any further changes, unless there are any glaring bugs):

CONTRIB-3126 there is now a setting to alow teacher marks to be locked once they are set to 'yes', users with the capability 'mod/checklist:updatelocked' will still be able to edit them (by default, teachers are OK, but non-editing teachers will be locked)
CONTRIB-3062 you can now view the date/time when each item was last checked-off on the 'view single student report' screen (toggle button) - note if a student unticks & reticks the item, it will change the date
CONTRIB-2161 when viewing a summary report for all students, you can switch on editing of the teacher marks (so you can update several students at once).
Added a short warning message to the report/edit tabs if automatic updating is switched on, but the checklist is set to something other than 'student only' (as that seems to cause some confusion)

If anyone wants to update any of the translations, then that would be appreciated. Please let me know if there are any obvious bugs in the new versions.

Hi Davo,

thanks for the update. I think I found a bug:

I use conditional activities. When a user visits the course page, those acitivities which the user should not be able to visit (due to the defined contitions) are either grayed out or totally hidden (dependent on the settings). But If the user goes to /my and then clicks the checklist, there are links to the activities, which are allways active.

I think most consistent would be to use the same settings as in the course and also implement same behavios (link either hidden or grayed out).

Greetings,Flotter

@Flotter

Thanks, that does sound like a bug (and it is quite likely to be the case as well, as I've not checked the my page, since I fixed the visibility of activities in the first place).

Could you pop it on tracker.moodle.org and I'll try to fix it when I get a moment?

Done (CONTRIB-3141)

I just made a complete moodle 2.1.1 install and there isn't the above mentioned problem. Now I am not sure whether I made something wrong before or maybe checked sth wrong (e.g. admin account instead of normal user).

In other words: currently I can not reproduce the bug and all works fine.

I will also add this to the ticket...

Quick Question Davo,

When i export the checklist in excel, i don't see the headings of my checklist. is it easy to be able to export all the items in the checklist including the headings?

Thanks.

Sam

Open up grade/export/checklist/export.php

Find the the 2 lines which contain the following:

AND itemoptional < 2

AND i.itemoptional < 2

Remove that section of each line (and only that section - leave the rest of the line intact).

To be clear - delete the 'AND' the 'itemoptional'/'i.itemoptional' and the '< 2' from these two lines, then leave everything else in the file alone.

This should include the headings in the output (I've not tested it, but it should work).

Thank you DAVO ! what could we do without you man!!

You are the best!

Just a small note, to say that I've added 'paging' to the checklist report page, so now you can view students 30 at a time, rather than all of them at once.

Available now from the links on the Modules & Plugins database (for both M1.9 & M2.0)

I am using Moodle 2 and am finding that the checklist doesn't always get updated. The activities are checked off via Completion Tracking, and the grade is reported to the gradebook. For example, I have 6 SCORM packages in a lesson, A B C D E and F. A student completed all 6 successfully, and they were checked off on the course screen via completion tracking. However, on the checklist only D and F did not get automatically checked off (the settings in the module are correct). I thought it might just be a matter of time, but it has not changed in 9 hours. I read some posts about cron job (I know nothing about coding) so I asked our system admin what the cron settings are, and he sent the following: cron.d: 　sysstat cron.hourly: 　mcelog.cron cron.daily: 　0anacron cups makewhatis.cron prelink tmpwatch 　0logwatch logrotate mlocate.cron rpm cron.weekly: 　0anacron 99-raid-check makewhatis.cron cron.monthly: 　0anacron Does this tell me anything? Any idea why this might be happening? I previously had the exact same issue with the Progress Bar block. Thanks for your help!

@Nicholas - this seems like a very odd issue.

If packages A B C and E are correctly being checked-off, then it is clear that the cron script is running and is updating the checklist properly.

However, you say that two packages are not updating correctly, despite them being finished according to the completion tracking. You could try a quick visit to [moodlesite]/admin/cron.php and see if they update after that, but I suspect that is not going to solve your problem.

I can't really offer any futher advice without access to your data. If someone was able to run the following query on your site, I *might* be able to work out what is going wrong (but it may not help at all):

SELECT * FROM mdl_course_modules_completion c JOIN mdl_course_modules m ON c.coursemoduleid = m.id WHERE m.course = [put in the ID of the course] AND c.userid = [put in the user ID here] ORDER BY c.timemodified;

You can get the ID of the course by going to the course page and looking at the address - it should say course/view.php?id=NN, where NN is the course ID. Similarly, look at your profile page and the address will be user/profile.php?id=NN where NN is your user ID.

The query will list the completion status of every activity, for that user, in the course and may give some clue as to why it is not updating.

Davo, thanks for replying so quickly. I did the things you suggested.

1) I ran cron.php, and the following was in the resulting report (looks OK, right?):

Processing module function checklist_cron ...... used 2 dbqueries
... used 0.0010969638824463 seconds
done.

After I ran it, the Checklist was the same as before (i.e. it wasn't updated).

2) I ran the SQL query you posted. It asked me to replace "mdl" with "prefix", whatever that means, so I did that. The resulting report is attached to this post.

I see 6 rows which I assume correspond to the 6 activities the student successfully completed. So I'm guessing everything checks out here, too?

Does anyone have any ideas about why this might be happening? Is there anything else I could try?

Thanks for your help! I hope I can get this to work - it looks pretty awesome!

I just ran the query on a student for whom the completion of all 6 activities is reflected in the Checklist, and it looks pretty much identical to the query data above.

I am at a loss... Very sad...

@Nicholas

1. That means the query didn't find anything to update (this time) - there were no completion records modified since the last time cron was run.

2. I gave you the raw SQL query to put directly into a database, as you used (I assume) the custom reports module, or similar, to enter the query, it asked you to put 'prefix' instead (in case your Moodle site used something other than mdl_). Either way, the query worked.

Unfortunately, the query didn't tell me anything useful. I had hoped that one of the modified dates would have been a long time in the past, or something, so that might have explained what was going on ... but no such luck.

Could you try one other thing - go to the checklist settings, find the setting for 'check-off when modules complete', set it to no & save settings. Then go back to the setting, set it to 'Yes' (it is up to you whether or not you let students override the ticks) and save again. This should force a refresh of all of the tick marks against the completion table. Let me know if this updates the ticks correctly.

>as you used (I assume) the custom reports module...

Yes, I used the custom SQL queries report admin report plugin.

I did what you suggested, but unfortunately, the ticks were not updated. I then tried a ton of other combinations of settings in the module just for good measure, but nothing had an effect. I wonder what in the world the problem could be???

Thank you very much for trying, though. I seem to be the only person who has had this problem so far, which is very odd. The only difference from my situation and others using your modules (maybe) is that I am located in Japan - but I don't see how that could have anything to do with the problem, since it's not related to character encoding or anything like that...

Oh well. If you are out of ideas I think I might have to give up...

I just did an experiment. I set "Check-off when modules complete" to "No", logged in as the student, and manually checked off all 6 activities. Sure enough, the checks also appeared in the Checklist when I logged back in as administrator.

Next, I logged in as the student again and removed all 6 checks. As expected, all checks were gone from the Checklist when I logged in as admin.

Now, when I tried to refresh the checks by switching "Check-off when modules complete" to "Yes, cannot override", then to "No", then back to "Yes, cannot override", NONE of the checks I removed reappeared. I then ran cron.php and got:

Processing module function checklist_cron ... Updated 25 checkmark(s) from completion changes
... used 2535 dbqueries
... used 1.5493819713593 seconds
done.

But still, none of the checks reappeared.

Is Checklist supposed to pull data from Moodle's completion tracking every time Checklist is "refreshed", even if the checks were once deleted manually? If so, this is not working, and may be related to the problem?

One last thing: the "Course completion status" block seems to update properly when I run cron.php

Not sure if this gives you any hints or not but...

Thanks for the information, but I'm unlikely to have a chance to look at this further until st least the weekend.

Nicholas - sorry for the very long delay in getting back to you (I've been rather snowed under with other development work, so I've not had much time to look at this).

I've just checked in an update which might fix the problem ( make sure you grab it from GitHub, as I've not pushed it out to the new Modules & Plugins database yet).

If you go to the checklist, switch 'Check-off modules when complete' to 'No', save the settings, then switch it back to either of the 'Yes' options, then the checklist should re-read all the completion status's and update the checklist.

You were right in what you said earlier, the checklist usually only looks at any completion that has happened since the last time that 'cron' was run. To look at all the completion states every time would take too long.

I've been running experiments and am not sure if I understand. I have autoupdating of the modules turned on. But I, as a teacher, want to override this also. For example, I have it set that the students need to get a 7 on quiz for it to check off. If a student gets less than a 7 it won't check off and they need to come discuss the quiz with me. After I have reviewed or given them some kind of retake, I want to go in and check off that quiz even though their grade on the quiz is still less than a 7. Is this possible?

Hi David

Like many others here I would like to say a big thank you for this plug-in.

We do not use the Moodle grade book as our HND course is based around passing of learning objects (LO's) (with merits/distinctions) and so your checklist has just filled a big hole in showing student progress - many thanks again !

A couple of questions if I may -

1) The export feature - our teachers need to give co-ordinators a matrix showing which LO's have been passed and which merits/distinctions have been achieved. The export feature just gives an overall percentage. Is there any way to export the list of checklist items with the ticks showing what has been achieved ?

2) We are using Moodle 1.9.11+ with the Fandango theme (and I'm not technical enough to mess about with HTML or CSS) but I find that the checklist items are difficult to read showing up in white text on a grey background (see pic) - is there any way to change this text colour ?

Checklist screenshot

1 The included checklist export plugin does this, assuming it was installed at the same time, visit Grades, Export, Checklist.

2 The problem is clearly with long checklist items disagreeing with the table header format for the theme. I think the solution would be to edit the theme, find the th section and set the background-color value to a suitable shade of blue (I don't have any files in front of me now, so I can't be more specific than that)

Hi David

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Re the formatting (2) I had guessed you might say that ! It will have to wait until I can find someone friendly to have a look.

Re the export - yes, installed this part of the plugin but try as i might I can only get it to give a percentage for each student rather than export the table of results. Am I missing something ?

Thanks

The 'checklist export' does not include any percentages at all, so you must be using the 'Excel export' option instead. Try this screenshot and make sure you are choosing the right option from the 'Grades' page:

Checklist export

As for the CSS problem - you could try this.

Inside the 'fandango' folder, open the 'gradients.css' file.

Add the following (at the end of the file):

th.header {
background-color: #4e8fd0;
}

I've NOT tested this, but, unless I've made a mistake (backup the file first!), this should effectively extend the bottom colour of the gradient to cover the rest of the space below the end of the gradient.

Thanks David, I'll try the CSS modification next week when the college is closed.

As to the checklist export, mine looks like this and whatever options I try I only get the student % completed list. I did add the export folder a while after I'd installed the other two parts of the plug-in and the Notifications didn't seem to add anything - do you think I need to re-install the plug-in again to get the options you're showing ?

Checklist export

Kevin - those are the options you get if you go the the grades page and choose 'Export > Open Document Spreadsheet' from the drop-down list.

If you want to use the checklist export, you need to choose 'Export > Checklist export' from the drop-down list (as shown in the screenshot in my previous post).

Hi David

If I go to Grades and then use the drop down menu at the top of the screen the Checklist does not appear anywhere on the dropdown.

Maybe it's not installed correctly ?

Try downloading the checklist plugin again and make sure you install the files which go in grades/export/checklist.

After that, checklist export should appear as an option on the grades page.

Thanks David

I re-installed and noticed I had the grades checklist folder in the wrong place (D'oh !) - all working now !

I'll try that template fix this week.

Many thanks for your help and the excellent plug-in

Davo, the checklist is wonderful - got it up and running in 2.1 without a problem. One way I'd like to use it, however, doesn't seem to be doable at present. Please let me know if there's currently a way to achieve this; if not, I'd like to add it as a suggestion for a future version.

I'd like the teacher of a course to be able to create a checklist of items that students need to accomplish. Students can tick these off, as well as adding their own items (i.e. of intervening steps they may need to take.) All of that is already doable.

However, as long as the entire checklist is complete, the teacher will be happy; the student should be able to set DUE DATES for each item, if he chooses. In other words, let the STUDENT be the one to have the flexibility to edit a checklist in order to:

a) add due dates to each item on the list (which can then be exported automatically to his own calendar)

b) add new items to the checklist, with their own accompanying due dates.

Right now, students seem not to be able to do either of the above.

Summary: I'd like an option to give students full power to set their own due dates on teacher-created and student-created items; I'd like these settings to remain at the user level, and not affect the master checklist, so that each student may choose dates most convenient to them. (And so the checklist can be used perennially.)

Thank you,

Mark

That's a nice idea, allowing students to set their own deadlines.

At the moment there is no support for that, as the deadline is stored in the item data, rather than per-student.

Certainly possible to do, but I'm not sure when I'll have time to do so. Please could you add it to tracker.Moodle.org, so I don't forget?

Hi Dave

Just a quick query on group selection. Is it possible to highlight/select more than one group ? Using CTRL doesn't seem to work:

No, there is no support for multiple groups in the block (although you can have multiple instances of the block, one for each group).

Maybe something I can add in the future ...

Thanks Dave - that would be really useful

Hi Davo,

I am not sure if this is a bug or i am just not sure of what i am doing here.

we have more than 3 groups but when they try to export checklist Yes(s) and NO(s) in the greade export, they see students from all the other groups. i believe the course is sat to seperate groups.

Please advise.

Thanks

Sam

That's not a bug or something you are doing wrong.

The checklist export outputs all the grades for a checklist, it does not include an option for choosing which group to export. I'm not sure quite what you mean about 'they see students from other groups' - are you granting students permission to run the export? (It is intended for teachers to use).

it is intended for teachers to use but when teacher A from Group A when he exports the Yes/no csv file he sees student from Group A and Group B. when he is supposed to see only students from his group.

i hope i explained it better...

OK that makes a bit more sense. However, the export still does not have any support for groups. It could be added, but not any time soon.

If you add it to tracker.moodle.org them I'm more likely to remember to look at it some time.

Davo,

Really appreciate this plugin. Exactly what I was looking for.

I'm a programmer myself and can contribute if needed - looks like you're taking on all the laod for this. I would like to see the plugin capable of having a scale of 1-10 rating for each checkbox as opposed to a simple yes/no. Is this easy to setup?

I have a scenario where we grade a student based on performance so they can assess how much they need to concentrate on each area. Once an area reaches 8/10, they get a passing grade.

Thanks!

Matt:
You are more than welcome to take a look at the code.

The checklist assumes in a lot of places that the student has ticked an item if it has a student timestamp. You might need to change that in a lot of places.

I'm happy to talk you through the code if you want me to.

Davo, is it possible to not (grade/export/checklist) export the optional items i have in my checklist ?

Please advise and thanks in advance!

Ale

Alejandro:

Open up grade/export/checklist/export.php

Find the two places that say 'itemoptional < 2' and change them to 'itemoptional < 1' (or even 'itemoptional = 0' - either will have the same effect)

That should do it.

OH ijust noticed now we can export by groups, that's awesome Davo!

Thank you..

million bucks question, could we export by countries ?

Export by country is not an option, however, if you want to include country data in the export, then edit the grade/export/checklist/columns.php file and add 'country' => 'Country', to the list (make sure you add a comma after it, if it is in the middle of the list, or before it, if it is to be the last item in the list).

Once you've exported the file, you could then filter by country.

Hi David

A query has come up regarding our use of the checklist - we are using it to list the learning objectives for course units and mark off when students have achieved them. The query relates to when a student passes but on a resubmission so from the dropdown of blank/yes/no we would like to add a fourth of YES(R) or Y(R) in the export checklist.

Is it possible for us (ather than you) to alter the options available for checking off items ?

Many thanks

@Kevin - the options are set at the code level, not at the user level.

Adding extra options would, unfortunately, be a fairly big job, as there are numerous places in the code that reference the teacher mark.

Should I have the time, I'm considering refactoring the code to make it a lot easier to manage the check marks and make alterations to the available options (technically this would involve adding a new PHP class to represent each check and update all the code to use this class, rather than manipulating the database directly). However, time isn't something I've got enough of at the moment (hopefully in November, I'll be a bit more available).

Thank you Davo for everything you have done for us !

Hi Davo,

please look at the picture attached and let me know if you could do this.

it's pretty much that a person with a teacher role can actually see him self listed in the checklist but can't update it. only people with higher role can update his.

Thank you!

I can't think of a simple way of doing this, without inventing a new capability to control it.

I'm going to have to put this on the 'unlikely to ever have time to do it' pile.

Davo, i have an amazing idea! could we make the users name static ? so we can scroll side way and not lose the sight of the apprentices?

thank you but just an idea now that you added the paging.

Lovely idea, but it can't be done with tables in webpages.

Hi Davo,

i am a teacher and i have an operation manager who i need to notify when i am done with the checklist of each of my employees.

Right now the checklist module sends an email upon completion, is it ok if i ask you to have a button to manualy submit that email ? it will help us alot to submit whenever we want even if we are not done yet.

thank you,

Ale

Sorry for the slow reply Alejandro - the message got lost in a pile of things I needed to reply to.

I'm afraid this isn't something I'm likely to add - it's not something that I would imagine is going to be used by the majority of people and I've only got limited time to develop my plugins at the moment.

However, it should be a fairly simple thing for another developer to add - they can look at the function 'checklist_update_grades' in 'mod/checklist/lib.php' to find the bit where I send out the email, to get started.

That sounds cool !

Hello,

Nice activity.

I update mine like in the picture, so my students can see there progress bar on the course page (like unread message for the forums).

Not tested for group activity... yet.

To add that, simply copy / past the next few lines at the end of locallib.php (befer the ?> ).

/**
 * @param cm_info $cm Course-module object
 */
function checklist_cm_info_view(cm_info $cm) {
    global $CFG,$USER,$OUTPUT,$DB;
	$userid = $USER->id;
	$checklistid =  $cm->instance;
	$modcontext = get_context_instance(CONTEXT_MODULE, $cm->id);
	    if(!has_capability('mod/checklist:viewreports', $modcontext)) {
		$out = '<span style="align:right; float:right;"><a href="'.$cm->get_url().'">';
		$out .= checklist_class::print_user_progressbar($checklistid, $userid, '120px', false, true);
		$out .= '</a></span>';
		$cm->set_after_link($out);
	    }
}

Tested on 2 sites.

Eric

Nice idea, thanks.

I'll see if there is a sensible way to add an option to allow that in the standard release if this module.

Good idea but Sorry this didn't work

Hi,

Tested on Moodle 2.1, not under...

Eric

Hi Davo please see this video i put up together that explains it more than words. we are trying to mix both Checklist module and stamocoll module.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16836794/davo/davo.html

Please advise!

Thanks

You won't need to change my checklist code to do that, just the stampcoll code.

Look at the address for the checklist report page, it includes the id of the checklist and the userid of the student you want to view. You just need to change the code that outputs the username on threw stampcoll page to output a hyperlink to the report page (inserting the relevant userid and checklist id).

Hi Davo,

Could you please guide me as i have every teacher in our school asking if we could do this. i believe this we need only when we export to excel!

We are wondering if you could patch the export csv file so it shows so under the headings it will show the percentages of their subheadings

Thank you!

Greetings from all of our teachers

Must admit Great Plugin!

From what i can understand as a newbie, you can edit dates for each item of the checklist but Does this module have the function of adding an item to checklist which is actualy a date item where the student / teacher can pick month/day/year and click save?

I am thinking more of Completion Date Item... You know!

Students cannot directly enter dates, but if you go to 'Report', then click on the 'magnifying glass' icon to see an individual student's report, you can then click 'toggle dates' to show/hide the date/time when they ticked off each item.

That's awesome!

Now that i am using this module more and more i think what i tried to ask earlier was: when i add an item to the checklist, i have the option to make it required, optional or a heading. how hard is it to add a fourth option: date format?

Sorry for the confusion.

I still don't know that that 4th option would do - why not just create a heading that says 'Final deadline' and edit the date beside it to show that date.

Alternatively, a teacher could add a comment, to include the completion date (when viewing the individual report, click 'add comments'), the student could add an item of their own to record when they completed the checklist (although this would not be visible to teachers), or, as stated above, just look at the date when the student ticked the last item off.

Without really understanding exactly what you are trying to achieve with this 'date format' (especially as I can't quite see why this would be editable by both students and teachers), I can't really comment further (it also doesn't sound like the sort of thing I'm likely to have time to attempt any time soon).

Thank you. Problem Solved!

One More Question, how can i export another column in the checklist grade export which shows the Role ?

I'm not sure that 'role' was one of the fields I added any special code to allow in the export.

You can include a list of groups, or any fields from the user profile (including custom fields).

Hello,

we use the checklist to sign off the students 'on the job' work but my boss has to confirm every Yes or NO i sign. Therefor we set the checklist to Student and Teacher checklist in the settings.

May you show us how to be able to use the chebox next each each item in the checklist ? right now it's locked.

Regards

The student can tick the checkbox, the teacher can select the yes/no box.

There is no way for the teacher to tick the checkbox (other than on their own checklist).

Hello, great module. Have not had any problems with it.

I have lots of activities in section 5, but I don't want to show them all, so in my course settings I choose to show 2 sections only with links to those activities and I want the students to see activities from section 5 in their checklists.

How is it possible to change the code to show activities from hidden sections? Thank you!

@Sergei - it will be somewhere inside the 'update_items_from_course' function in mod/checklist/locallib.php - but you'd have to read through the code to find it, as I've not looked at it for quite a while.

Thanks. I found it and I understand that I have to comment/change some lines but I can't figure out which lines to comment/change.

It will be one of the lines that mentiones '->visible' although you have to dig further as I think the 'getfastmodinfo' function works this out from both the module visibility and the section visibility - if you're happy to have hidden modules shown (as well as those in hidden sections) then you should be able to edit this quickly. If that's not what you want, then I'm afraid you're going to have to spend some time digging through the code to find the answer.

Thank you! I will look into it.

Davo,

This is a great addition to Moodle.

When I export/checklist export from grades, the system processes and I wait then download the Excel sheet. But the workbook is ø k.

I've tried it a few times on different courses which all have activity. The "Show Progress" report with checks, shows fine on screen but then no data to Excel.

Thanks in advance for your help.

@Don:

Is this on a site where you can enable debugging?

If it is - then that would help to work out what is going wrong (Admin > Developer > Debugging - set debugging to 'All' and display errors to 'ticked').

Another thing you could try, if you're not afraid to open up a couple of PHP files, is edit grade/export/checklist/export.php.

Find the section 'FakeMoodleExcelWorkbook' and remove the '/*' from the start of the line, as well as the '*/' symbol a few lines later. Then find the line '$workbook = new MoodleExcelWorkbook("-");' and change it to '$workbook = new FakeMoodleExcelWorkbook("-");'. If you now try an export, it will show, on screen, exactly what it was trying to ouput into the spreadsheet.

Greetings Davo,

I am trying to lock the optional items by default in the checklist and only people who can unlock the Yes back to No should be able to sign off on optional items.

please shed some light

Thank you

John Sam

Optional items are not treated any differently from non-optional items in terms of checking them off.

The only differences are they are displayed differently and not included in the 'required items' progress bar (or the overall progress %). If you want optional items to be treated differently on your site, then you will need to customise the code to do so.

is it easy to do ? any support is much appreciated

Hi Davo,

I just added checklists to my Moodle course and I'm sure my students will find them useful.

My question is, can I prevent them from showing up in the gradebook? I really just intend for students to use this as a tool to help themselves stay on track. I have the max grade set to 0, but they still show up.

Thanks!

Lisa

You can hide any item you like in the grade book, but going to the settings and clicking on the 'hide' icon.

You could also use categories to gather together all the grades that you are interested in in one place, while leaving other grades to one side.

Hola Davo, Any new features happening with the checklist module?

Saludos

You can see a log of all changes I've made here:

https://github.com/davosmith/moodle-checklist/commits/master

Many of the updates are just minor tweaks / tidy ups, but ones starting CONTRIB-XXXX are more likely to be bigger features (as they are related to issues in tracker).

Gidday guys, this looks like a great module for us to use, and has been pretty easy to get configured after you spend a little bit of time to have a good look at it. The only real problem I'm having is that some courses are refusing to enumerate "course modules". As an example I have one course with a quiz in it where with "Show Course Modules in Checklist" set to "Whole Course" it quite happily populates into the list (along with the other stuff from the course), but with another I just get "No Items in the Checklist", nothing shows up. All items are set to visible, and I've compared both the quiz and checklist settings between the two and they are identical.

That being said I'm new to this role, and have spent most of my time playing around with back-end issues, so not 100% clued up on the front-end course design side of things. Is there something blatantly obvious that I am missing as to why I'm getting a list of items on some courses, but not on others?

Cheers

How do i change the $userlink to point to the user checklist instead of his profile ?

I know it's in locallib.php but i tried this

$userlink = <a href="'.$thisurl.'&studentid='.$auser->id.'</a>';

but it didn't work. Ummm Davo... Help! haha

@Akejandro - The URL for viewing a student's checklist is:

[webroot]/mod/checklist/report.php?id=[cmid]&studentid=[userid]

(See the code in block_checklist.php or the code for generating the '$vslink' in locallib.php, function view_report()

@Nathan - Not sure why it would work on some courses, but not on others.

I always use the standard 'get_fast_modinfo' function to get the list of activities in a course, then loop through this to generate the checklist.

If you want to find out what is going wrong and you have some understanding of PHP, it would be helpful to add the line 'print_object($mods);' just after the 'get_fast_modinfo' line in 'locallib.php: function update_items_from_course()'.

You could also try uncommenting some of the 'echo' lines in the same function, which will give a little more commentary about what is going on. After that, it would be a case of adding extra 'echo' statements, to track down why items are not being added.

Gidday Davo, many thanks for the quick response. Going through the output from the above has pointed me in the right direction.

It looks like any object I wack up anywhere is picking up a sectionno of 0, and that is why they're not being enumerated. I'm not quite sure why this is happening, as it is even happening if I add a new object (say an additional quiz) to a section that is otherwise working, new objects are copping a sectionno of 0 even though the pre-existing objects seem to have the correct sectionno value.

As a quick fix I've change line 176 (from the Moodle 1.9 version) of locallib.php from $section = 1; to $section = 0; to start the enumeration from section 0 rather than section 1, and this now has these objects enumerating, but I'm not entirely comfortable with that change.

I'm not familiar with how sections work within Moodle and can't find any clear documentation that explains how the system determines an object's sectionno when created, but I would have presumed that it would be as simple as putting it in the right place and it will adopt the correct sectionno, but this does not seem to be the case.

That being said these are courses that have been backed up from our live Moodle instance and restored into a dev instance, so not sure if that is breaking things somehow. I'm kind of worried I'm missing something obvious in relation to how to give a sectionno value to an object...

Sounds good, but back to square one hehe i am using it but i would like my students to be able to pick their groups within their profiles and not within the home page...

I have been trying for days and days now to create a checklist in one course 1 and make it show course contents of couse 2. course 1 and course 2 ARE TWO seperate courses.

is there a way to this please?

Thanks

Ale

@Alejandro There is no automatic way of doing this. You would have either manually type in the list of activities, or adjust the code to parse the list of activities from a different course. I can't offer any specific help with this, you'll have to look through the code and figure it out for yourself.

My last question would be.. us teachers get very confused when we first click on checklist as it brings us to the first preview tab. how do i change it to link to the report tab instead ?

Gracias /Davo Mastro

@Alejandro - that would be possible, but fiddly to do, without disabling the 'preview' page entirely.

The landing page for a module is 'view.php', this is also the page that the user is sent to if they click on the 'view / preview' link. If you adjusted that page to show a report to teachers, then they would always see that report and never the preview.

The best approach would be to create a new page 'viewlist.php' which would be a copy of the current view.php, then edit the original view.php, so that instead of the last line, it read:

if ($chk->canviewreports()) {
redirect($CFG->wwwroot.'/mod/checklist/report.php?id='.$cm->id);
} else {
redirect($CFG->wwwroot.'/mod/checklist/viewlist.php?id='.$cm->id);
}

You will then need to go through every reference to 'view.php' in the mod/checklist folder (and possibly blocks/checklist and grade/export/checklist as well) and decide whether or not it needs to be changed to 'viewlist.php'. There are about 23 references to check, from a quick search.

any idea why i set the checklist : Preview a checklist to : Prevent for students yet they can still preview it Davo ?

Students usually have view permissions, not preview (that is meant for teachers to see a checklist, but not save check marks for themselves).

This is really weird ! something weird happened . i have the teacher ability to be able to do the yes/no , unlock and everything .

Today when i did the viewlist.php it worked good for a bit but now all teacher's don't even see the checklist Tabs ! all that happens when we cick on checklist name we land in the view.php or viewlist.php no tabs at the top of the checklist to do the YES/NO for our teams.

i even stored back the checklist original view.php but still!

allthough when i login as moodle admin i can see the tabs ?

Please assist me here Davo as i got both hands up and i am ready for the boss to shoot a big 'You are Fired' bullet haha

i found it!

just incase someone needs had the same problem:

i have to Put:

Objective Inherit
Create and edit checklists *

Hola Davo, is there a way to exclude optional items from exporting to excel?

I have also tried to change Y and N in the grade/export/checklist/export.php to something like Good / Bad but when i export to excel still see Y and N ?

@Alejandro - I was about to tell you what lines of code to change to make this work, but ended up adding an extra couple of lines to make an option in the interface to support this.

Then I got carried away and integrated some code for displaying percentages in the export, that John Samuel sent me back in October ...

Anyway, download the latest M2.x version from the plugins database and it should all work for you.

@Davo

but i am using moodle 1.9

@Alejandro - then you've got something to look forward to when you upgrade to Moodle 2.x.

I'm no longer maintaining the Moodle 1.9 version of this plugin. If a major bug / security issue comes up, I'll fix it, but new features are 2.x only (if you really want a feature back-ported to 1.9, you can always take a look a the changes I've made, via the github repository, and try to add them back in to the 1.9 version - the releavant commits are shown here:

https://github.com/davosmith/moodle-checklist/commit/93c282b69838120bed093dc95af5a6aa3c60e642

https://github.com/davosmith/moodle-checklist/commit/afa075c43ad16fe3079d3394b7b77e50d80ac468

).

Oh shoot i love the ability to export optional items or not but i couldn't copy it to the 1.9 export.php some lines didn't look the same . i hope someone can give me a hand here thanks

Gidday Davo, I've resolved the issues with object enumeration, now the only remaining is that I can't get the email notification to fire off on completion of a checklist.

I've set quiz : Get email notification of submissions to Prevent to stop the lecturers from getting an email on every quiz attempt as per their request, and have set up a checklist on our test course with Checklist : Receive completion emails set to Allow in the Lecturer permissions, and the checklist itself is set to "Email Teachers when checklist is complete" as yes.

When the Cron job fires off the checklist for the student who has passed his quiz is clocking over to 100% complete, but no email is firing off, is there any other requirement I'm missing for getting this to happen? Email does work from the server as the standard quiz notifications were working, but the lecturers have decided they don't want to be bombarded with emails from all the failed attempts so Checklist seems the best option to lock it down to successful attempts only in our Moodle 1.9 environment.

@Nathan - if you open up mod/checklist/lib.php and search for 'emailoncomplete' then you will find there all the code for sending out the email when the checklist is complete.

The easiest way to test this is to set up a checklist which you can tick yourself and then add some 'echo "I got here";' lines into the code to see where it gets up to. But basically it does this:

check if the grade for the checklist == maximum grade
check if 'emailoncomplete' is set
check the Moodle logs to make sure this checklist wasn't completed in the last hour (so a student clicking the last item 'on' and 'off' repeatedly won't send out hundreds of emails)
get a list of all users with the capability 'mod/checklist:emailoncomplete' for this checklist
send each of these users an email

Thanks Davo, again that's put me on the right track. Some weird things happening with the $logcount value, always seems to be sitting at a minimum of 1, and jumps up by different amounts whenever a checklist is completed which is why no email was ever being sent.

For now I've commented out the check on wether the checklist was completed in the last hour to get them going (the primary usage won't be based on students being able to check themselves off), but when I get a chance I'll have a better look at what that value is and where it's coming from, as it would be nice to leave that check intact for any course that comes along where students will need to be able to check off their own activities.

Hi Davo,

Could you tell me please how to exclude some people from showing on the grade-checklist-export csv file ? like administrator ?

i am trying to find the right spot where i can include 'and u.username <> 'admin' but got no luck

Thanks

J.Sam

If you just want to exclude site admins, then either upgrade to Moodle 2.x (or at least 2.2, I've not checked exactly when the change was made), as 'get_users_by_capability' automatically ignores site admins, who aren't directly enroled on the course. If that doesn't help, then find 'get_users_by_capability' in the export.php file and add ', false' (without the quotes) to the end of the parameters to have the same effect.

If that doesn't help, then try putting in a check just under 'foreach ($users as $user)', along the lines of:

if ($user->username == 'admin') {

continue;

}

That worked thanks. what if it's a custom profile field that i want to filter by ?

Assuming i have a custom profile field 'state'

i tried :

if ($user->state == 'NJ') {

continue;

}

but didn't work

@John - it wouldn't be a 2 line code change - you'd have to load all the custom field data, before you could do that filter. I'm not sure if I could answer that quickly off the top of my head.

Hello First of all, thank you for this really great module ! I was looking for such plugin to offer both self-assessment and official assessment of competencies. I am planning to use it together with Mahara ePortfolio (to collect evidences) I would like that my students can add a comment (like teachers can do) to paste an url to a mahara page that shows evidences for the competency item. Do you have any advice, where i can add such feature in your plugin ? It seems that i will have to duplicate the table mdl_checklist_comment Thanks Regards Emilie Lenel

@Emilie

Not sure what you are hoping to achieve by duplicating the mdl_checklist_comment table. The original table should be fine for your purposes. What you will need to do is look in mod/checklist/locallib.php at the view_items function. Sadly, this has grown considerably since I first wrote it and, as it is one of the key central parts of my checklist code, it does rather too much and really should be rewritten and tidied up a bit.

Anyway, if you look through there, you will find that the '$viewother' parameter keeps track of whether the checklist is that of the current user (allowing them to add private items and to check things off), or that of another user (allowing them to add comments, update 'teacher' marks and browse to the 'next' user). If you also follow the '$editcomments' variable (which appears fairly early in the function), that controls the form and the text boxes that allow the editing of comments. You might want to duplicate some of that code so that the teacher comments are kept separate from the student comments (use the 'commentby' field - either check if 'comment->commentby == comment->userid' or set 'commentby = 0' for comments students make on their own checklist; I'll leave it up to you to decide which is best).

You'll also need to take into account that the comments by teachers are saved as part of the 'process_report_actions' function (inside 'updateteachermarks'), so you'll need to duplicate that functionality in the 'process_view_actions' function (which passes on information to 'updatechecks').

I hope that'll get you started, but be aware there's a reasonable amount of work in there (including settings to control which checklists allow student comments and, possibly, a new capability in there as well).

Thank you Davo for your feedback! I will have a look how to adapt the locallib.php to allow students to add comments; indeed i should be able to use the mdl_checklist_comment table directly for this purpose. Do you know if i am the only one asking for such feature ?

Hope i will be able to implement it

Regards,

Emilie

@Emilie - I don't recall anyone else asking for this feature.

Are you planning on sharing the finished code back again? If so, please be aware that I can be a little picky about code that I integrate back in (as I'm going to be the one who has to keep it maintained and working in the future). If it is well written and doesn't break any of the current features (and defaults to 'off', unless explicitly switched on via the checklist settings page), then there is a good chance I'll add it to the 'official' version (when I have time).

Hi Davo,

AnyWay you can show me a string to add to the locallib.php to lock all optional items in my checklist please? pleasee ?

Thank you,

ALE

@Alejandro - you will need to explain this a lot more clearly.

Do you want optional items locked so you can't edit them? Locked so they can't be made into required items? Locked so students can't tick them? Locked so students can tick them, but can't untick them? Locked so teachers can't tick them?

Always locked? Locked when you click the 'lock' button? Locked / unlocked via settings or via a capability?

Locked as capability, only people with a special role can check yes or no .

Thank you.

We use this approval at the end of the checklist but we need to lock it on the teacher's view and only people with a different role can approve it. thus i thought to make it optional and have you help me to add a line or edit a line in locallib.php to treat optional items like the checklist treats the YES when it's locked or something.

Ale

Ola Davo and happy saint patrick's day to everyone here.

Any updates on how to make optional items locked yet mate?

Thanks!

In a few weeks time when I next sit down to look at the code of my checklist plugin (my spare time is currently divided between completely rewriting my uploadpdf plugin to work with Moodle 2.3 and taking a break from Moodle), I can probably have a look at this.

Basically you want a way of marking certain items on the list so that only users with a higher capability (editlockeditems) can change their value? I'd probably implement with a new capability (to change the locked items), a new advanced settings page option (to enable the 'locked' type - defaulting to off) and a new option in the 'required, optional, headings' toggle to lock a particular item (plus a few lines of code to check the capability to edit that item).

In the meantime, adding this to tracker.moodle.org makes it more likely that I will remember this when I next look at checklist issues.

That's it!!! i will go ahead an put it on a tracker for you.

The thing is i am using moodle 1.9 and cannot upgrade to moodle 2 i hope you can give me instructions on how to do it on moodle 1.9 when its done.

Honestly.. i love your plugin and this option i requested is pretty much all this wicked plugin is still missing.

Thanks again

ALE

please make it a week instead of weeks HAHA i have never heard of moodle untill a mate of mine told me about this checklist module.

Hats off to you Davo.

Thanks for the hard work.

Hi I want to be able to put separate headings the checklist but it seems to only allow me to add checklist items. We are using Moodle 2.2, I know I must be missing something really simple but I cannot seem to edit the section headings. Thanks

Once you have added an item, click on the green tick to its left. One click will turn it into an optional item and another click will turn it into a heading

Cheers,

Fred

You can't edit items imported from a course (as any changes you made would be automatically overwritten the next time you refreshed the page and it pulled the data back out of the course).

Ideally the headings should come from the section names, rather than the section number, but that will have to wait until I'm next doing some coding on the checklist (which will probably be after I've finished working on the drag and drop code for Moodle 2.3, as well as rewriting uploadpdf for Moodle 2.3).

Hi Davo

For sure, if i succeed in adding this feature.... i will share it with you

But if i succeed...

Regards,

Emilie

Hi Davo!

Is there any way to hide comments from a role to see?

Example: we use your wonderful plugin at school and we set the checklist to -Teacher only.

Teachers approve the students competencies and directors do the final approval.

the issue here is that when the director leave a comment for the teacher, the student is able to see it. which we really wish it wasn't the case. Any ideas please on how to prevent students from seeing the comments ?

Thanks a Bunch Davo!

J.Sam

Comments are designed to be a way to give feedback to students.

I guess it would be possible to add a capability check before displaying them, but not something I've looked in to.

Thanks Sir!

Hi Davo

We are currently having the exact same problems as Daniel Wright above where the students are completing their activities by manually ticking them off and the checklist progress bar is not being updated.

Your answer was:

@Daniel Wright: You have set up a 'student & teacher' checklist.

The teacher has not ticked-off the items, so they are not considered 'official' (so the progress bar is not updated).

If you want the progress bar to update as soon as the 'student' has checked them off (by completing the activity), then you need to set it to 'student only'.

Our checklists have always been set to 'student' checklist. We are using Moodle 2.2.2+ and checklist version 2012030500. Cron job runs every 15 minutes.

Cheers,

Ali

@Ali - it isn't completely clear from your question how the students are ticking-off items. Are they ticking them off on the checklist, or are they using the activity completion to tick them off?

If it is the second one, then what output do you get from cron - does it mention the checklist activity? Does it mention updating items from activity completion?

If you look at a student's checklist (in the report view), does it show the items as completed?

Hi Davo, apologies for the vagueness.

Yes the students use activity completion to tick the activities off.

Manually run cron job:

Created missing context instances Cleaned up stale user sessions Running auth crons if required...
Running enrol crons if required...
Running cron for enrol_self...
Running cron for enrol_cohort...
Starting activity modules Processing module function assignment_cron ...... used 3 dbqueries ... used 0.017687082290649 seconds done.
Processing module function chat_cron ...... used 5 dbqueries ... used 0.0042440891265869 seconds done.
Processing module function forum_cron ...Starting digest processing... Cleaned old digest records ... used 3 dbqueries ... used 0.0043849945068359 seconds done.
Processing module function quiz_cron ...Starting quiz reports Finished quiz reports Starting legacy quiz reports Finished legacy quiz reports ... used 3 dbqueries ... used 0.0045819282531738 seconds done.
Processing module function scorm_cron ...... used 1 dbqueries ... used 0.0067851543426514 seconds done.
Processing module function checklist_cron ...... used 6 dbqueries ... used 0.010477066040039 seconds done.

Looked at the student's checklist report view and shows that they have NOT completed the items, even though we haved logged in as this student and they have used activity completion to manually ticked the items off. Within Moodle's course completion report that are seen as ticked off.

Cheers

Ali.

First of all, I love the checklist module and associated block and export. I see our teachers and students getting a lot of benefit out of it.

I'm having the same problem as Ali and Daniel. Running the latest moodle 2.2.3+ (0601 build) I set up an activity as "Students can manually mark the activity as completed." Then I log in as student and mark it as completed in the center column of the main course page. When I check the activity completion report, it shows up as completed, but in the view progress tab of the checklist, it does not show as completed for either teachers or for that student. I ran the cron job manually just to be sure. No changes.

Matt

I've not had any time to look at the checklist plugin before today. I've just released a new version, which, apart from a few styling tweaks and a couple of minor bug fixes, also introduces a new bit of debugging code for the automatic cron updates. Please download from the plugins database and follow the instructions in the README if you are still having problems with automatic updating of student checkmarks.

Cheers Davo

Will test updated plugin for Moodle 2.3 within the coming weeks and will report back either way.

Cheers

Ali

Hi,, I am not yet a user of Moodle, but one of the things I am trying to evaluate is if Moodle has, or if there is a plug infor, accomplishing a competency self-assessment and official assessment of competencies. The idea here is to load our competencies and then have mangers assess employees or allow employees to do self assessments. Thanks!

I am unable to embed images into the directions using the File Picker. Images embedded with a URL work fine. Are there any future plans to make files uploaded to Moodle accessible? Not a big deal, but it's something I'll pass along to our teachers.

Thanks.

Hi

Am running the checklist 1.9 version (upgrade imminent) but i am having a weird problem.

When there are over a certain amount of select dropdowns in the View Progress/Edit Checks view, the last few dropdowns do not get saved.

I have tracked the issue to the locallib.php file in the updateallteachermarks() function (i only have teachers editing). It appears that..

$checkdata = optional_param('items', array(), PARAM_INT);

...omits information for the last few rows of users.

Has anybody encountered this issue or anything similar?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Check like your PHP settings. Something like max_input_vars (I'm not able to look it up at the moment as I'm away from the computer). This setting restricts the maximum number of values your server will process at once, for security purposes.

max_input_vars did the job... thanks for the lead

S

I spotted a reference to max_input_vars in the forum subscription emails, and had to chime in here: we just had a bunch of patches rolled out unexpectedly and found that max_input_vars suddenly appeared - it was causing this exact issue except in the Grader report, which was particularly frustrating in large courses where only a few students would work!

I've got a change to the form structure (in the Grader report) which we're currently testing. I'll submit it via a relevant tracker ticket soon, assuming satisfatory test results; it makes it very very unlikely that you'll hit the (default) max_input_vars limit, without making any changes that the users will notice - and without having to limit the number of students shown per page (as the current workaround in 2.x does). I'm not familiar with the checklist, but I imagine that a similar solution ought to be possible there too - Davo, if you're reading this, feel free to drop me a line and I'll happily discuss with you how you might be able to implement it in the Checklist module (maybe a successful deployment in Checklist will help get it implemented in the Grader report more quickly).

-Paul

Thanks for your suggestion Paul - I've now updated my Checklist plugin to avoid problems with max_input_vars: https://github.com/davosmith/moodle-checklist (not updated main moodle.org download just yet)

Hi

I love this plugin!

Is there a way (I can't figure it out) so that a checklist is updated by the activity completion criteria) and teacher ticking only? I want the teacher to go in and mark all the work that is submitted and then some things I just want them to tick off (eg: student shows a positive attitude).

Student only=activity completion ticks or student ticks to say complete

Teacher only= doesn't use activity completion

Teacher and student= both need to tick but I want teachers to only go and do one thing (mark the assignment).

Is this possible?
Thanks!

Becky

Currently the student mark is the only one updated by the activity completion.

Theoretically, I could make that a settings option, but I can't promise when I'd have time to make such a change.

Adding it to the checklist module on http://tracker.moodle.org is a good way to remind me to look at it when I have some spare time.

Hi Davo,

It think I found 2 bugs. I am using the latest checklist plugin with moodle 2.3.1

1. The Enter button is not visible. It can be seen during loading but then it disappears

2. Images which I put into the description do not appear when viewing the activity.

I have tried it with several themes.

Cheers,

Flotter

Flotter - does the checklist update when you click on the items on the list? If so, is there a particular reason why you also want a save button?

I'll check the code for outputting the description to see if it is missing the code to output images.

Thanks for your quick reply.

Yes, the checklist updates when I tick off items.

I work with conditinal activities and I want the depending activity opens after the user ticked off the whole checklst. I assume when the users click the enter button, there will be a re-load of the whole page. So I would write in the checklist description that users should click this button (or reload the page).

If the enter button would not reload the page, I would add my own button in the description. I already did this (as workarround for the non-existant enter button), but unfortunately, the image does not appear when viewing the activity (in the editor it appears).

Flotter

As mentioned above, the lack of images is a bug. Next time I'm updating the checklist plugin I will fix this bug (it will only by one line of code that needs chaning). If you want to make sure I don't forget about this bug, please open an issue on http://tracker.moodle.org to remind me.

Thanks a lot!

Is the enter button also a bug? (if yes I would also enter this to the bugtracker. If not, I would not add it).

flotter

There was never an 'enter' button.

The 'save' buttton is deliberately hidden when javascript is on.

As I've already made clear in my previous post, this is a feature, not a bug.

There is absolutely no reason (from within the checklist) why you would ever want to click on the 'save' button when the checklist is updated as it has already been updated on the server when you click on the items.

Ok, understand why the save button is hidden when JS is enabled and it's definitely not a bug.

The image bug I have added to the bug tracker.

Thanks for your time & effort!

Flotter

Davo,

Thank you for a great module. I am not sure if what I have is a bug or a problem with my Moodle, so I thought I would post it here first.

We are running Moodle 2.3.2 (Build: 20120910) - Have not updated to 2.3.2+, but will request that if you think it would help.

We can add a new checklist, but when trying to make changes to an existing one - even one that was added moments before - Moodle returns "Error reading from database". Turning debugging on gives the following information and stack trace

Debug info: Unknown column 'completionpercent' in 'field list'
SELECT completionpercent FROM mdl_checklist WHERE id = ?
[array (
0 => '48',
)]
Error code: dmlreadexception
Stack trace:
   •   line 407 of /lib/dml/moodle_database.php: dml_read_exception thrown
   •   line 945 of /lib/dml/mysqli_native_moodle_database.php: call to moodle_database->query_end()
   •   line 1346 of /lib/dml/moodle_database.php: call to mysqli_native_moodle_database->get_records_sql()
   •   line 1419 of /lib/dml/moodle_database.php: call to moodle_database->get_record_sql()
   •   line 1400 of /lib/dml/moodle_database.php: call to moodle_database->get_field_sql()
   •   line 1379 of /lib/dml/moodle_database.php: call to moodle_database->get_field_select()
   •   line 93 of /mod/checklist/lib.php: call to moodle_database->get_field()
   •   line 370 of /course/modedit.php: call to checklist_update_instance()

This happens even if no changes are made but either of the save options are chosen when exiting the settings page.

All instances of Checklist that I have checked return this error no matter when they were added - even if created in 1.9.

At least one of the affected courses gives this following header on the course home page wit debugging turned on:

Notice: Object of class stdClass could not be converted to int in /usr/share/moodle/blocks/checklist/block_checklist.php on line 186 Warning: array_key_exists(): The first argument should be either a string or an integer in /usr/share/moodle/blocks/checklist/block_checklist.php on line 187

Any help or advice is appreciated. If I can supply more information, please let me know.

David Morrow

Sorry - forgot to add that this problem occurred both before and after upgrading the Checklist module to version 2012092002 and the block to 2012092200. Thanks.

Tackling the second error first - the error in the block is something I just fixed a couple of days ago, so please download the latest version of the code and that should fix it.

The first error is a little trickier to solve - it looks like one of the database fields is missing form the mdl_checklist table. This is odd, as whether the checklist was installed fresh, or upgraded from an earlier version, it should always include that field.

If you have access to the database (via PHPMyAdmin or adminer.php or the like), then the simplest solution would be to go into the mdl_checklist table and add the following field:

name: completionpercent
type: bigint(10)
NULL: yes
default: 0

However, you may find that there are other fields missing, if that one is missing, so I would suggest you take a look at 'site admin > developer > xmldb editor', scroll down to the 'mod/checklist' entry and the click on 'Load' then 'Edit'. At this point you should be able to check through all the tables to see if there are any missing fields from your database tables.

Thanks for the rapid response! In the spirit of hoping you are still close at hand (and with the full disclosure of stating that I know I have more rights than I probably should!)...

I have access to a webmin console. I can apparently make the addition that you mention - here is a screen shot:

webmin_checklist

Do you mind commenting as to the accuracy of my values?

Thank you!

David - that should work, although, technically, the 'default value' should have the right-hand radio button (beside the '0') ticked. In practice, this is unlikely to make any difference, but, for completeness, that would be the correct setting.

Have you been able to check to see if there were any other fields missing?

Thank You! The addition of that field appears to have taken care of the error reading from database. And boosted my confidence!

I do apologize for being so late in responding. Frankly, I was not entirely confident that I could answer your question: not sure that I would recognize a missing field if I saw one - or didn't see one. I have checked through the tables and nothing was obviously missing to me. Should I be looking for an error message or alert, or is there a list of required fields against which I can check what I see? I'm including a screenshot of the fields listed in the "checklist" table:

fields

What should I be looking for?

Also - I do still get the error about the block, but I believe I have the latest version. I just today downloaded and installed davosmith-moodle-block_checklist-712307a.zip. Is that the latest?

Thanks again for the great module and all of the help.

David

That screenshot shows all the fields that should be in that table, along with the types, sizes and default values (for fields that have a default value).

That should match what you have in your database.

I don't know why you are getting an error from the block - the latest version that you have downloaded should fix the last remaining issue with it. Have you logged out and back in again since updating the block?

I thought I had - but apparently not. I just did and error is now gone. Sorry for the false alarm - and thanks for your patience!

On the database screen shot - if there had been any missing fields, would it be fairly obvious?

Again - Thanks!

This plugin works well in our instituation, thanks. But, we never got the Email send out, no matter what.

Our cronjob runs every 5 minutes. For example, there is a checklist, with 3 items: "green", "red", "yellow". One student checked all of them, at 9:02am. When will the teacher suppose to get the Email? Immediately or at 9:05am? Does the student have to manually check it as complete on the course view page in order to make it complete, or your program will automatically detect it as complete if all of the items are checked?

I guess the starting point for the cronjob is the "checklist_cron" in the lib.php file, right? What do the "checklist_autoupdate" and "checklist_completion_autoupdate" do? I traced and debugged a lot, but seemed it never reached the "checklist_update_grades" function, and I guess that's the place where the email will be send out. Why to check the "userteimstamp" in the "checklist_check" table, looks like it always has a value once the user checks the item.

Another question is MODULEID in the "CHECKLIST_ITEM" table, why I always get "0" if the item is input manually (not come from the other mudle of this course? Is that true?

Pretty complicated log behind the scene, it will be very helpful if you can explain clearly what the cronjob does, and how the email is send, thanks.

Emails are sent out immediately from checklist_update_grades, which is called whenever the checklist is updated (either by a student or teacher ticking items, or, if enabled, when an activity is completed). For student only checklists, the grade is updated when the items are checked-off by a student (or by automatic updates). For student + teacher checklists or teacher only checklists, the grade is updated when the teacher changes the items that are checked-off (but not if the student or the automatic updated changes them, as the grade is based on the teacher's marks).

The logic for sending the email, is to check if the checklist is complete, then check to see if the 'email on complete' option is selected for the checklist. Then there is a check to see if the checklist has already been logged as complete within the last hour (so a student clicking items on & off won't generate lots of emails to their teacher). After that, a list of people with the capability 'mod/checklist:emailoncomplete' is generated (by default teacher + editingteacher roles). Each of these receives an email with the details of the completed checklist.

checklist_autoupdate and checklist_completion_autoupdate are used to automatically mark-off checklist items that are associated with a particular activity. The second is used if 'completion tracking' is enabled for the activity and marks-off the checklist item when the activity is 'complete'. The first function is used if completion tracking is not enabled, and this version searches th

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New activity: checklist