Brightspace – Completion Tracking Tool

Set up the Completion Tracking tool

The Completion Tracking tool in Brightspace helps students stay on track with the course content and activities. It is possible to have the tracking be automatic after a student visits a page or does an assignment the tool will automatically show a checkmark icon. It is also possible to change the completion tracking option to a manual checkbox that the student must click. (See the directions below.)

When completion tracking is enabled for content and activities in the module, you will notice the progress bar at the top of the module page indicating the percentage of content topics to complete. Here is a screenshot of it. 

A student will see this progress bar at the top of each module with completion tracking enabled. After a student visits a part of the module, a checkmark appears to the right indicating that they have viewed the topic or completed an activity. 

Set up manual completion tracking for students

By default in the UVM Brightspace system, the completion tracking tool is set to automatically track student progress in a module. You may choose to change this to the manual tracking function. In order to make this change, you would do the following steps:

1. Click on the “Content and Activities” link on the navigation bar in Brightspace.
2. Click the “Settings” link in the upper right corner of the content area.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen, you will see “Completion Tracking” options. 

Change the default from Automatic to Manual. This will enable the display of a checkbox for students to manually click as they complete each section of the course content. To complete this change, click on the blue “Save” button.

Instructor Choices regarding Completion Tracking

Instructor Choices

Instructors have choices to use set completion tracking for an individual topic or entire module. Plus there are 3 types of completion:

1. Required: Automatic — Topics will be marked as complete when the student carries out a required action to the particular content. Please note that what “completion” means differs based on the type of content. Here is a breakdown of the meaning of “completion” for different content types.

(Sources: Teaching commons at Depaul University. https://resources.depaul.edu/teaching-commons/teaching-guides/technology/desire2learn/tools/more-tools/Pages/user-progress.aspx)

2. Required: Manual — Students will see a checkbox next to the topic, which they must manually click to mark the item complete.

NOTE: Changing an automatically tracked topic to manual completion resets completion tracking for that topic. This means that users might have to return to the topic to mark it complete; users do not need to resubmit files or assessment activities.

3. Not Required — No completion tracking will be recorded. For instance, all end-of-unit discussions in this course are optional and thus their completion status is not tracked. That means, you will not see a checkmark next to the topic. Neither is it included in the progress bar at the top of each module. However, students can still see it in their Class Progress report.

Tracking Assignment Completion

While you can find detailed instruction on how to create and edit assignments on Brightspace here, we want to bring it to your attention that different submission types  may indicate different completion tracking methods.