TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Setting Your Completion Conditions
- Completion Conditions: Student View
- Completion Conditions: Instructor View
- Setting Up Multiple Due Dates for Completion Conditions
Introduction
A useful feature for Moodle Discussion Boards is creating completion conditions. Enabling this feature allows you to reinforce your expectations and remind students of the requirements for a complete discussion forum.
To activate completion conditions, go to the Settings for your discussion forum and scroll down to locate Completion Conditions.
Click on the dropdown arrow to access all of the options for how students can track the completion of their discussion forum.
Setting Your Completion Conditions
The default setting is none. You can decide if you want students to manually mark the activity as done. However, a student may accidentally mark the assignment as done before they have completed it, or they may not fully meet your completion criteria. Therefore, to improve transparency and consistency in student completion, select Add Requirements.
Note: make sure your requirements align with the criteria you describe on your discussion forum
With the options for start discussions or post replies, start discussions, post replies, you will activate a box for you to manually enter the number of required start discussions and replies a student must complete.
Another useful feature of completion conditions is the Set Reminder in Timeline. If you use the Moodle Calendar feature in your block drawer, you can add a deadline for the forum.
You have now set up completion conditions for your discussion forum.
Completion Conditions: Student View
There will now be multiple ways a student can view and track the completion requirement for your forum.
Students will see a To Do dropdown menu next to the forum. They must click on the dropdown arrow to view the completion requirements. Once the student has met the condition, Moodle will automatically mark it as complete with a green check and text.
Additionally, when a student opens the forum, the completion requirements will appear at the top of the page.
Finally, if you use the Set Reminder in Timeline feature, this will appear on the Moodle Calendar for students who track assignments this way and will appear on their dashboard page for assignments still needing to be completed.
Completion Conditions: Instructor View
As the instructor, you will be able to see the same To Do dropdown menu next to your discussion forum. This menu lists your completion requirements and gives you a shortcut to easily edit your completion settings if necessary.
Setting Up Multiple Due Dates for Completion Conditions
If you want to have students complete an initial post before replies or before the discussion forum closes, you can, but be aware of a slight caveat.
Moodle doesn't differentiate between which deadline is for a post and which deadline is for a reply.
If you set up a Reminder in Timeline, on the dashboard, you have the phrase “forum requires action.” This can be helpful for an initial post deadline reminder.
Then, if you also have the general due date set through the Availability setting, it will appear as well on the dashboard with the phrase "forum is due." This can be helpful for when you wish students to complete their replies or complete the discussion forum.
