This is a 'follow up' tip from a recent post about Time-based activities where we discussed using the "prerequisite" feature of the Lesson activity to specify the length of time a student must spend on a task. Here is not the place to debate the pedagogical soundness of that requirement, suffice to say that the request does crop up on regular occasions on the forums. Lesson guru Jean-Michel Védrine has improved Moodle's Lesson, such that from Moodle 2.9 (out in May) teachers will be able to set "time spent" as a completion condition for a Lesson. What does this mean in practice?
The School demo site Staffroom course has an example lesson introducing Dyslexia to teachers and teaching assistants. It contains a number of videos, the first one 45 minutes in length, along with questions about the videos and also a variety of texts:
With this new feature, you will be able to specify that the student must spend a minimum time in the lesson - 80 minutes here for instance - before the activity is marked complete:
So, when a student is presented with (for instance) a video, if they don't at least stay logged in to the lesson for the required time, they won't get the completion tick/checkmark even though they will finish the lesson. Here's what happens if the student just rushes through the lesson. They receive a message that they completed it in less than the required time and therefore the completion box is not ticked.
And here is what happens when they spent the minimum time. Because they have completed the lesson in at least the minimum time, the lesson activity is marked complete:
If you're interested, here is the tracker issue: MDL-48715 Coming soon to Moodle 2.9