Course completion indicates if a course has been completed by the learner(s). It can show the progress a student is making towards finishing the course according to specific criteria. The criteria can include meeting an activity's grade level or a manual checking “complete” by either the student and/or teacher.
Therefore, course completion settings become relevant when:
you want to track your learners’ progress,
you want the certificate to be issued once the course is completed,
you want to indicate on the learners’ certificate that the whole course has been completed.
It’s important to note that course completion builds upon activity completion. Therefore, you should start configuring the course completion after you have all the activities in your course ready with the correct activity completion settings.
Course completion settings can be accessed via the pink bar on your course page if you click on “More” and select “Course completion” from the dropdown:
There are two conditions where you should always configure the settings: General completion settings and activity completion conditions.
Under “General”, the default is “Course is complete when ALL conditions are met” – you can leave this as it is.
Under “Condition: Activity Completion”, you can select all activities or resources from your course that should count towards the course completion.
This gives you different options:
You can just select all activities/resources from the list EXCEPT the course certificate*.
You select those activities that require active participation, a grade, etc. For example an additional resource such as a page wouldn't count towards the overall completion in this case.
*The course certificate is displayed here if “view” has been selected as activity completion criterion. However, you should never select the course certificate in the course completion settings because this creates a loop, and the certificate is never issued.
There are also other conditions completion can be based on, but they are usually not relevant.
After you have set all necessary course completion conditions, click “save changes”. Your learners’ progress is now being tracked accordingly and the course certificate will be issued once the course has been completed.