Overall progress excludes hidden activities

[Brian Winstead]

The overall progress which is displayed at the top of the page excludes hidden activities. This treatment is inconsistent with how Moodle tracks course progress elsewhere, in particular the Course Overview block. It is confusing for students to be presented with different calculations of their course progress on different screens.

REPLICATION STEPS

1. Create a new course with course format set to tiles format and completion tracking enabled.
2. Add three assignments to the course. On each assignment, enable activity completion tracking.
3. Enroll a student into the course.
4. Login as the student and complete one of the assignments.
5. Return to the course home and observe at the top of the page that overall progress is 33%.
6. Go to the My courses page and observe on the Course overview block that the course is also listed as 33% complete.
7. As the teacher/admin mark one of the assignments no yet completed by the user as hidden.
8. As the student refresh the My courses page and observe that the Course Overview block continues to list the course as 33% complete.
9. Enter the course.

OBSERVED BEHAVIOR:
At the top of the page overall progress is 50%.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOR:
At the top of the page overall progress is 33%.

‌

[David Watson]

Hi Brian this is one where opinion is likely to be divided on whether or not hidden activities should be counted. When I first wrote that code (a long time ago) Moodle core was excluding hidden activities. E.g. https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-51447 You can imagine a course which contained many hidden activities that students were never likely to see and this would skew the overall completion figure.

If time permitted I could make a setting allowing either, but even that may not suffice as there would likely be differences of opinion within a given institution!

So I think you best bet will be to avoid the issue by disabling the overall completion indicator in tiles as site admin. You can do this at site admin > plugins > course formats > tiles > other > Show overall progress indicator