Subcourse doesn't change to incomplete

[NickyKL]

Hi,
we want to use your great plugin to create metacourses in Moodle and to bundle smaller modules into one big course. Actually we are testing, if it fits for our usage.

But the problem is, if we add another activity to a course or just uncheck one and the course is incomplete then, the subcourse doesnt notice it. It doesnt change to incomplete, which makes it hard for us, to show the user, if they need to do anything else.

Would be great, if you could fix this :)

[mudrd8mz]

Hi. If I understand you correctly, you have a course that is already completed and you expect it to change back to incomplete. Right?

If so then please note this is not how the completion subsystem in Moodle has been designed. This has nothing to do with this plugin but with the Moodle core. Once a student completes a course, it sticks to that even when the conditions are later amended. The reasoning is natural - students do not loose university diplomas just because the schools raises the expectations after they finish.

If I misunderstood then please accept my apologize and feel encouraged to provide more clarification. Thanks.

[NickyKL]

Hi there. Thank you for the fast reply. Yes, this is how we want to use it.
I know, that you designed the plugin for students. We wanted to use it in business-context on a learning-platform for employees. With your great plugin, we are able to bundle a lot of smaller courses with different topics into a big one.

But of cause, it might be, that we add activities or sth like this and the user should know immediately, that there is new stuff and he hasn't completed it yet, even if it was completed before.

I understand, that you created this plugin more for students and grades and so on, but it is amazing to build a big construct of courses too. Maybe it is an idea, that you might be able to implement? :)

[mudrd8mz]

Please note. What I am trying to explain is that (if I understand it correctly) this is not something I designed in this plugin. It is how Moodle course completion works in general.

[mudrd8mz]

See details in the issue #16 This module has a custom completion rule so that it is marked as complete of the referenced course is completed.

[NickyKL]

yeah, i've seen this issue and im very happy that it has been implemented.
...
aaaah i think now i understand: you connected it to the fact, that the course is completed and not on the activities themselves, right? That might be the difference to the Snap-Theme, where you can see 9/10 activities completed.

So I guess it would be the implementation of the dependency of activities, to make my wish come true. Maybe you can think about it as an idea :) you could communicate the plugin as solution for structuring courses and metacourses. Only deficit would be, that you cannot hide the courses themselves

[mudrd8mz]

I must admit I don't fully understand what your wish really is. What do you mean by "connected it to the fact, that the course is completed and not on the activities themselves" ?

[NickyKL]

sorry, i'm not a native... if i'm to exhausting just tell me...
But if you have patience I can try to explain, what I mean :) I am really happy, that you want to understand, what I am talking about. Thank you.

do you know the theme "Snap"? In Snap you can see in "My courses" something like a progress bar, depending on the activities, a person did. There are some other plugins for showing this progress of completing activities. If a person did all the activities, Snap marks the course with the number 100% to show, that the course is completed.

Maybe we use moodle in a different way here in our company. We actually dont need grades or course completion, cause it is enough for us to show the person, that he did all the activities. We show this via Snap with the progress bar.

I found out, that a subcourse (linked to a real course) only get triggered and marked as done, when I set a course completion in the related course (which is usually connected to activitie completion). When I complete all activities in that course, but didnt set a course completion, then this subcourse doesn't get the information, that the course is completed (right?). But because the person did all the activities, he actually completed it in our way to use moodle (but subcourse doesnt show it).
That is how I understand the way, the plugin works and what my problem is.

So my wish was, to get a subcourse automatically unchecked, when a user unmarks an activity in the linked course or an admin adds another activity (cause its not 100% completed anymore).
I guess, to get this function work, it would be necessary to add something like checking the activity completion and not only the course completion.

I hope I was able to explain, what my issue was. Of cause it is your choice in the end, if you are able or actually want to add something like this.
In my opinion it would be a more powerfull plugin and the admins could create big structures of courses.

Thank you for reading all of this

[mudrd8mz]

I see now, thanks for detailed description. And yes I think you are right in all assumptions.

When I complete all activities in that course, but didnt set a course completion, then this subcourse doesn't get the information, that the course is completed (right?)

Exactly. Subcourse is not aware of what activities there are in the other course or if they were completed or not. The only thing it checks is the course completion. Not the one that Snap shows but the one built into Moodle.

I can understand how this would be useful feature and behaviour for you. But the design of the Subcourse module is intentionally light-weighted, relying on standard Moodle core APIs exclusively. Additionally, I can foresee quite serious performance impacts if the Subcourse had to check the completion status for all the activities and all the students in the remote course.

Is it common for you to extend the contents of the course once some students have it finished? I always thought that is something to be avoided. Once you have something done, it is a bit unfair to come as the lector and say "Well done, although I just added another task to the course so you are not actually finished as you thought" ...

[NickyKL]

Great that I could explain it to you. Thanks for trying to understand my issue :)

I am not a programmer, so I can only explain, what I see. And so I see Snap working like this and dont know how the technical performance would change for subcourse. You are the specialist for that :)

I dont know, how teachers use moodle and subcourse. Do they only use it for testing? When I think about a lecture it would make sense to me, that students are working on a course and FOR THAT MOMENT they are done and wait for the next instructions. The subcourse shows, that they are done and if another task is added/visible, the subcourse shows, that there are new tasks to do.

And well, I dont know if they would feel uncomfortable, but if they dont need to do all the activities again and only this new one, it wouldnt be that hard. What do you think? It would be another way to work with subcourse plugin and of cause it needs to be communicated

[mudrd8mz]

Thanks for reporting this suggestion. I am keeping it open as I can see it valid and actually reasonable feature request. Honestly though I can't promise I would be able to work on it anytime soon. Thank you for understanding.

[mudrd8mz]

Just for the reference, I am currently working on some improvements that can be related to this issue. The module will display the user's progress in the referenced course as shown on this screenshot:

As far as I know, this will still not reset completion state but it might be used as an alternative way of informing participants about their progress - without using the completion subsystem at all.

[reactor0138]

This looks great. Where would the text be coming from? The comments field in the final grade? If so to do this you need to do a grade override to write the comments and then the students get an Overriden message in their user report. This is not a good thing as our grades have complex calculations and we only use the grade override for very special circumstanses. We are very interested in having the comment come through to the overview report and Subcourse but not if it leaves an "overrridden" message to the student

[NickyKL]

That looks great! Thank you for working on that :) The Progress wont be 100% anymore if you add another activity? And the Check Mark also disappears?
Would it be possible to switch off the grade? We dont use grades here so that would be a nice thing.

[mudrd8mz]

• The Lorem ipsum text in the screenshot is the subcourse activity description, configured to be displayed on the course outline (standard Moodle feature).
• If a new activity is added in the referenced course, the progress goes down - it can even jump from 100% back to a lower number (as there is a new thing to do). Only if the referenced course gets marked as completed (via the standard course completion feature), then the progress is sticked to 100%. Again, these all are standard Moodle features, nothing custom to this module.
• Completion check marks appear only when the Subcourse activity has completion tracking enabled.
• If grades are not used, they would not display IIRC. Displaying the grade is an existing feature so if you can't see it now, nothing would change. Same with progress - if there is no information about the progress available (e.g. when the referenced course does not have completion tracking enabled) then no progress info is displayed.

[NickyKL]

Sounds awesome 👍

So, when you want to get the subcourses checked automatically, you will have the check mark after course-completion (based on standard moodle feature) and 100% progress.

If you add another activity, the progress will fall back like 90% and the check mark will still be there, because moodles course-completion doesnt reset, correct?

[mudrd8mz]

My experiments show that if the referenced course has been completed then the progress is always shown as 100%, regardless of how many activities have been actually completed. This is how the Dashboard works, too. But if the referenced course does not use Course completion feature, then yes. It would work like you describe - just that you could not use the "Student must complete the referenced course to complete this activity." option.

[NickyKL]

Ah ok, actually if I would use progress shown, I dont even need the check-marks, cause 100% is also completed. That could work for us! Great job!
Would it be possible to add some formatting to the 100%, when it is there, like bold or color? That would make it easier for the learner to scroll through the subcourses and see, what he hasn't completed.

[mudrd8mz]

You should be able to customize the formatting eventually by locally modifying the string and putting the required CSS into it.

[reactor0138]

Have been playing with this about the only thing I can think of with the progress bar are 2 things. Having the progress is great and on the next page the bar. I think that if it is complete it woul dmake more sense that the grade does not say current grade but Final grade or something like that. A great improvement too would be that if the learner clicked on the progress bar it would take them to their course completion page to see what was outstanging

[reactor0138]

sorry no luck pasting a picture for that one

[peverist]

To further add to this issue, I really like the Sub Course plugin but I manage a Moodle 3.10 site for a hospital that has lots of compliance modules where some need to be completed as a once off and others need to be done annually. Departments have a 'learning pathway' course that uses the Sub-Course plugin to provide tracked links to courses that need to be completed and provide any easy way for the course teacher (department manager) to track progress using the Course Activity Completion Report.
For one-off courses it's perfect but we also use the Local Recompletion plugin ([https://github.com/danmarsden/moodle-local_recompletion] for annual courses to auto reset activity completion and course completion after a given number of days (e.g. resets a course that needs to be done on an annual basis after 365 days). As noted in earlier comments, the grade / progress gets updated to 0 but the activity completion flag still shows as completed.

The ability for the activity completion to be 'unticked' when the referenced course gets reset would be very useful.

[mudrd8mz]

Thanks @peverist for additional info. I'll try to see if I get some time to explore the activity completions API more to see if there is a way to get this done. Sorry for not promising anything particular, my current time capabilities are quite limited.