Best practice forum (Archived)

Unable to complete courses

Hi,

I am currently familiarizing myself with all the features of TOTARA and I'm coming across an issue which I've been unable to solve: I can't complete courses.

First I created courses with face-to-face activities, to which I assigned completion criteria (no matter the criteria: the problem is the same for all), then I created a learning plan with the courses I created.

In order to test the course completion functionalities, I assigned myself as learner and trainer (I'm also Admin) for a particular course, I enrolled myslef in the face-to-face activities prepared and completed the necessary criteria and activities in order to complete the course. Yet whatever the criteria chosen in the "course completion settings", the course never shows as completed, whether in the course completion status box or in the "records of learning"

The problem is the same even when the only course completion criteria is "Self Completion"(see attached snapshot).

Can someone help on this issue, it's becoming a major issue to me.

Thanks.

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Do you have the cron set up to run?

Course completion uses the cron to complete courses so one reason courses might not be completing is if the cron isn't running.

You can manually run the cron by visiting [site url]/admin/cron.php as an admin, or configure your server to schedule it to run regularly.

Simon

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Thanks Simon: the server cron was indeed the cause of the problem. Once cron was initiated, the course completion feature worked just fine.

Thanks again for the prompt advice.

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No problem, glad you got it working.

Simon

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Hi Simon,

I have a question about the activity completion. Does the cron also 'tick' the 50% passing grade?

I tried all the settings, the global tracking, the activities settings, and also the course completion setting. And even tried to run the cron manually as you suggested, but to no avail, I still can't get a completed status in the course completion block.

Thanks.

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Hi Hazmy

I tried this out with a course with one evaluation activity that required completing to complete the course.

I completed this activity as a learner and manually ran the cron job to complete the course and the report showed a similar picture to above with the activity ticked but the course complete not ticked.

The activity did not require a grade for completion and the activity was completed as a learner.

The completion routine does seem to work - I allowed manual completion by user and when this was checked the course for the user was completed. There may be a problem with completing the course with some grades so will test out a bit more to try and see if there are circumstances where this doesn't work as expected or if I have missed a course setting somewhere.

Craig

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Hi Craig,

How are you? hope all things are fine there.... How about the problem for the course completion? do you find any solutions at the moment? I'm still stuck with the passing grade not tick...

Thanks...

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Hi Nurhaisyam

Sorry for not getting back to you - there could be a number of thing that could be causing this. There was a similar discussion below on the forums on what to check to ensure that completions are processed correctly. The other thing to do is to upgrade to the latest release of Totara because completion processing has been improved recently.

1. Click Site Admin > Grades > General Settings and ensure that 'Enable completion tracking' is enabled. Just below that setting you can set which roles will be tracked (typically just learner is fine).

2. Next go to the individual course settings page for the course you want to track, and ensure that 'Completion Tracking' is enabled. You may also want to start completion tracking when the student enrols by checking the checkbox. If you want to enable these by default on all courses go then also set them in 'Site admin > Courses > Course default settings'.

3. Next you need to set up 'Activity Completion' for the course activity. Go to the activity settings page and set the options in the 'Activity Completion' section. You can decide here what the student needs to do to complete the activity (i.e just view it, or achieve a grade, or a particular status).

4. Finally, go back to the Course and you should see a 'Completion' option in the course admin menu. Click there and set up the 'criteria' which determine when the course is complete. You should see the activity you just set up under 'Activities completed'. You can set just a single criteria for completing the course, or multiple criteria on this page.

5. Finally, some parts of course completion require the cron to be running to correctly aggregate the data, so make sure your site cron is running.

Hope that helps!

Craig

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Hi Nurhaisyam

I tried out the instructions above and this worked - it may be step 4 that was missed because adding the activity completion criteria in step 3 does not automatically add this criteria to the course completion option.

The process would be simplified if the activity completion could be added to the course completion criteria by default.

Craig

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