Forum

Hi all,

I have been assisting a higher ed institution in understanding the expected behaviour/capacity for Forum activities regarding the "Require view" component of Activity Completion. 

This particular institution has identified that when instructors provide their students a direct link to a Forum post (i.e to  .../mod/forum/discuss.php?d=XXX as opposed to .../mod/forum/view.php?id=XXX), the 'Require view' portion of their elected Activity Completion options is not being marked as complete. I have replicated this on https://sandbox.moodledemo.net/ (see this screen recording)  

My advice to this institution has been that this kind of situation would not have been anticipated as an expected trigger for completion. It appears completion satisfaction for this criterion is based solely on a user physically clicking into an activity from a course page, rather than routing to a sub-page directly. Beyond this, the usual advice for a while now surrounding this particular completion criterion is that you would usually not opt for a 'view' condition for every type of activity in considering it complete (either alone or in combination). It doesn't guarantee users have read/interacted with anything and other completion criteria would better suit if the intention is to require user interaction(s). You would want to set activity completion to capture tangible user engagement with a Forum (i.e require posts, discussions or replies).  Given viewing the Forum is implicit to those requirements, a view requirement is usually unnecessary.

(I have also informed them of the problems with this criterion where if for any reason you needed to reset/change the activity completion for an activity after the fact with this set, the change wipes all completion for users as opposed to other criterions which do not as detailed via https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-58266) 

All-in-all, my explanation was accepted, however they are wondering if there is any way (setting, workaround, etc) that allows views of the Forum posts themselves to also trigger the 'Require view' criterion.    

Any help, insights, observations regarding this would be appreciated. 

TIA,
Alex