The Activity Completion settings give you the possibility to define under which conditions an activity will be defined as completed by learners. You should define activity completion criteria for each activity or resource in your course.
In general, there are three options – of which you should always only choose one (!) for each activity:
Do not indicate activity completion: Learners won’t see a “tick” next to the activities in their courses and it will not be possible to track if an activity has been completed or not. Use this only if progress doesn’t matter for a certain activity (e.g., additional info materials).
Students can manually mark the activity as completed: Learners can press the box (tick) next to a certain activity to indicate that they have done it. (Note: they can do this even without having entered the activity and without having actually done it.) This should only be used as kind of a “self-check” for learners.
Show activity as complete when conditions are met: The activity will be automatically marked as complete once certain specified criteria are satisfied. You can usually choose between two options:
The learner must view this activity to complete it or
The learner must receive a grade to complete this activity
Please note that “view” only requires the learner to open the activity –as soon as this has happened the activity will be marked as completed. This might be acceptable for optional or additional resources, but whenever possible (e.g., for all kinds of assessment) you should require a grade. Also, because the “grade” setting doesn’t require a specific passing grade (if you haven’t set one) –in the simplest case it just needs the learner to click through all parts of an assessment activity/participate in all interactive elements.
For certain types of activities, like for example quizzes, there might be additional options to the “grade” condition, such as requiring a passing grade, or all attempts to be completed. In that case you would also need to define the passing grade under the “Grade” settings of the activity/set a number of maximum attempts.
Please note that for certificates you MUST choose either “do not indicate activity completion” or “must view”.
Once you have set up activity completion, the built in Activity Completion report will be available to course administrators. This will list all learners on your course and show whether they have completed each activity or not. Learners can see the selected condition as a “To do” in the course:
Once the activity has been completed, it will be marked as done:
Since all activities slightly vary in this regard, please consult the Moodle Documentation if you have further specific questions.