Friday, December 11, 2015

Completion Tracking and Bubble Numbers

Always exciting to learn something new - a little humbling when it's so obvious.

Talon has 3 different modes for completion tracking of content items in a course. The default is set to Required: Automatic. This mode checks off completion for students mostly when they click the link to the content item. For a dropbox or quiz it waits for an actual submission, but mostly click and it's marked complete. The second mode is Required: Manual - this mode let's students decide when they are finished with that content item. The student checks the box themselves to indicate (to themselves) that the item is done. The third mode is Not Required - no check box appears to students at all.

What I recently learned is that the bubble number displayed in the Table of Contents under Course Contents is different for faculty and students. For faculty, the number represents the number of required content items. For students, it is the number of remaining required items that need completing within that module. As students manually or automatically check items off, the number goes down. Once they complete everything a green check marks the entire module as complete.

With this in mind, take care on how you set completion tracking for your content items. Simply going with the default Required: Automatic may not be communicating what you intend to students.

Student view of Course Contents showing Required: Manual completion tracking.

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