Keep in mind that you can shoot the iPad with a machine gun and that wouldn't prevent the the user from opening a new window on the phone that's in their pocket, or their smartwatch. You can do some things like Jason mentioned, but the result is only that you make it slightly less convenient to Google the answers. You'll never get close to making it impossible.
You can run kiosk mode and there are a few other options. Each of these makes it more likely that they'll be on Facebook on their phone during that time, rather than looking at both Facebook and the course on the computer screen. There is no technical measure to ensure that they are looking at the material. Come to think of it, people get up to get a sandwich when the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders come on the screen, so there's probably no non-technical way to force someone's attention either.
Do you want the students to gaze at the material, learn the material, or know the material? If so, you might consider checking to see that they know it (get a 90% on the pretest and you're done) or that they learned it.
Thanks, Tim. Checking into this, it looks like in PHP 5.3 or higher class_alias() may be exactly what we need.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.class-alias.php
I haven't tested it, yet, but it appears to be designed to solve this problem.
On a side note, this is one of the small housekeeping tasks I'm trying to finish up for MDL-40457 - I just need to document the deprecations and get the 7@M2! test suites to run properly on my machine. All of the classes have been both moved to classes/ for autoloading and namespaced. While moving and renaming them, I went ahead and cleaned up all of the coding style warnings. Removing known_coumn_types got rid of 53 lines of complexity. That was a really good idea.
When moving code to namespaces, what is best practice regarding deprecating the old name of the class?
For example, question_bank_edit_action_column has been renamed core_question\bank\edit_action_column .
Should the old name, question_bank_edit_action_column, get stub implementation such as the following?
class question_bank_edit_action_column extends core_question\bank\edit_action_column {}
I don't know if the above would work, but it seems something along those lines should do the trick to alias the ld name to the new name.
I wrote a module for this which I'd be glad to share.
In addition to getting rid of old completion data, it also removes old grades, quiz attempts, scorm attempts, etc.
The reset can either be done manually, or automatically when they enroll in a course they were previously enrolled in, but the old enrollment has expired. As-is, our plugin makes a backup of the removed data in csv format. If anyone would like a copy of this plugin, please send me a message by clicking on my user name. I would just post a download URL, but I can't upload it somewhere accessible right at the moment.
The plugin may need a few lines added to the configuration if you use activity types that we don't use. I can provide instructions for how to do that.