Access, retention, attainment and progression in and beyond education are all components of student success. Success in each of these areas depends on the extent to which students are engaged, and their belonging is fostered within their programme and wider institution, across the whole student lifecycle. (HEA, 2016)
Moodle offers a variety of options for enhancing student engagement & tracking progress, including Grades, Conditional Activities, Activity Completion, Course Completion, Open Badges, Course Reports, and Progress Bar plugins.
Activity Completion
Activity completion allows the tutor to set completion criteria in a specific activity’s settings. A check (tick) 
appears against the activity when the student meets this criterion. The criterion might be viewing, receiving a certain score or a student marking it as complete.
Why use Activity completion?
- If this feature is enabled, it is a helpful way for students to be able to track their progress in a course. The student has an easy to see a checklist of what they have done so far.
- It can also be linked to Course completion in order to allow both students and tutors to watch progress through a course. As each activity is checked off as “complete”, the student moves further towards final completion of the course.
- It can also be linked to Conditional activities in order to allow the tutor to set criteria upon which a student is allowed to progress through a course and access materials (Adaptive/Personalised Learning).
Tutors can view the ‘Activity Completion Report’ (above) at any time to check the progress or engagement of students.
To enable Activity Completion in your Moodle course simply go to Administration > Course Administration > Edit Settings > Completion Tracking.
Then you can set Activity Completion criteria on each Resource or Activity as required:
Video: Moodle 3.8 – How to track Activity Completion
Completion Progress Bar
The Completion Progress Bar is a time-management tool for you and your students. It shows progress in activities/resources and is colour coded to quickly see completed/viewed activities. Tutors can select which pre-existing activities/resources are to be included, and they can be ordered by times/deadlines or their order in the course. An overview page shows tutors the progress of all students and combined progress on My home page.
The Progress Bar Block
Setting up a Completion Progress Bar
- Turn editing on
- Create your activities/resources as normal
- Set completion settings for each activity you want to appear in the bar, including an expected by date
- Add the Completion Progress block to your page (How to add a block)
- Move your block into a prominent position (click and drag the block title)
- (Optional) Configure how the block should appear
Hidden items will not appear in the Completion Progress block until they are unhidden. This is useful for a scheduled release of activities.
Course Reports
A Log (https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Logs) of activity in the course may be generated by a tutor, this shows what pages the student accessed, the time and date they accessed it, and their actions (view, add, update, delete).
A Course Activity Report (https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Activity_report), showing the number of views for each activity and resource, can be viewed by tutors and, if Individual Activity Reports are enabled for a course in the course settings, each course participant can access reports of their contributions, such as forum posts or assignment submissions, logs and a statistics report.
A Participation Report (https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Participation_report) for a particular activity can be generated by a tutor, and an extremely useful feature of the participation report is the option to send a message to all students who have not completed a certain action.
With Statistics (https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Statistics) enabled for the site, graphs and tables of user activity can be generated. The statistics graphs and tables show how many hits there have been on various parts of your course during various time frames.
Find our more by watching this Course Reports YouTube video:
Staff may want to consider how their engagement with student access, retention, attainment and progression in HE can offer an effective approach to areas of activity, enable deeper understanding of core knowledge, and demonstrate alignment with professional values. It is particularly relevant to the following dimensions: Activity: A1, A2 and A4 Knowledge: K2, K3 and K4 Values: V1, V2, V3 and V4. TEL encourages staff to evidence their engagement in this area in applying for HEA Fellowship in recognition of their commitment to professional practice.
If you have any questions or comments then please leave them below. Alternatively, if you would like any help, information or advice about tracking student progress and engagement in Moodle then please contact TEL@yorksj.ac.uk.
Stay safe!
Phil
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