Visvanath Ratnaweera

IF there is a DONE button on the content page, then at the bottom - I'm in agreement. My question was, whether the "Mark as done" button on the course homepage isn't sufficient. See the screen-shot:

P.S. We are in the "Lounge", the small-talk area. Your Q1 belongs to Teaching with Moodle or Themes forums. Q2 is more for the General questions.

P.P.S. On a site like moodle.org, where hundred odd forums exist for as much different areas, it is better to post the questions separately, unless you are sure that they belong to the same area.

Hi

You asked:
> 1) can the location of the "mark as done" button be changed to be below the content material instead of at the top?

I'm a new comer to Moodle 4, rel. 4.1 LTS to be exact, and was surprised by this button. Here is an example:

No, I don't know a solution. The usual remedy here is to make then invisible through CSS, but you need one at the bottom of the activity page, right? So far, the "Mark as done" flags were only on the course homepage. Aren't they sufficient?

Did you follow https://docs.moodle.org/401/en/Upgrading to the dot? Also Before you post... read this...

If it is a fact that you have nothing in moodledata/filedir/, and according to the database table mdl_files there should be, your server has gone rogue. Moodle is not known to do such things, nor swap PHP versions mid game. Some other powers are at play.

To recap, you installed a fresh Moodle 4.2 about two weeks ago, right? What happened to the install of a 4.2 a month ago? Or the previous Moodle 3.10 you upgraded to 3.11.5 eighteen months ago? You need to close the old threads before starting anew! Read the Site policy.

"It is recommended that the cron is run every minute,.. Cron is a general advice. Moodle does thousands of "timed" tasks - sending forum mails after an editing delay is a simple example. The PHP language being interpreted, has no inherent timers. So repeatedly running the cron.php is the way for it to go through the to-do list. Counter-intuitively, the more often cron is called, the smaller the to-do tasks get. The 1 minute comes from the resolution of the Unix crontab.

As you observed the "house keeping" tasks are not that urgent. So 15 min interval is probably sufficient. But there is a whole group of tasks which are related to student activities. Note that in Moodle the students not only interact with the learning material and the teacher, they also interact amoung each other. Moodle is made to handle hundreds of thousands of students meeting in courses which may also have thousands of participants. Depending on how the teacher runs the course, a delay of 15 min could break the dynamics. Think of a railway station, where the clocks jump in 5 min ticks, not in 1 min ticks! But if no trains leave your railway station, even 24 h resolution for its clocks would be sufficient. ;)