Wow, thank you everyone for your feedback! It's strange because as far as I know no-one has mentioned this issue before now, but it is clear that it is affecting a lot of people. We will definitely see what we can do to help, but there are some technical issues to work through.
The first thing we can probably do quite easily is to change face-to-face activity completion to use the session date for activity completion. This would fix the dates in the "Activity completion" report (Accessible via Reports > Activity Completion within the course).
The course completion report is a bit trickier though, because completion can be dependent on any number of user selected criteria. The naive approach would be to just use the f2f session time instead of the current time if any of the criteria are a face-to-face activities. That would work for the simplest case (completion configured to depend only on a single f2f activity), but there are cases where it would cause problems. For example:
- Completion criteria requires completion of a f2f AND a quiz. The user completes the f2f first, then a week later the quiz. The completion date would be set to the date of the f2f which would be wrong in this case.
- Completion criteria requiring completion of TWO separate f2f activities within a course. The system would need to know which date to use.
You can see we need a rule (preferably a fairly simple one) that we can apply consistently to get the behaviour we want in all cases.
One approach would be to look at the completion dates of all of the individual criteria, and select the latest one when setting the course completion date (if criteria are aggregated using ALL). If criteria are aggregated using ANY then it would use the date for the first criteria to be completed.
I believe that would give us the behaviour we want (in conjunction with the change to activity completion described above) but it is a fairly significant change to the core Moodle code that Totara is based on. We may need to make this change use an optional setting to enable it to maintain the existing behaviour for people who rely on the current behaviour. I will also need some time to discuss the idea with the Moodle course completion maintainer and see if it would have any unexpected implications.
I'd appreciate any feedback on whether that sounds like that would be suitable or not, or any suggestions of alternative ways for the logic to work.
On the subject of historic uploads, there will be a feature in 2.5 which will allow you to provide a file containing users, courses, completion statuses and dates which might help resolve some of the issues that have been mentioned.
Simon
