Understanding what student actions trigger the completion of each lesson type helps you review analytics with more clarity.
We’ll first cover the key concepts to know as you’re reviewing analytics for your training domain and associated courses and lessons. Then, in the linked articles, we’ll describe the specific triggers and associated lesson completion behaviors of each lesson type.
In this article:
Key concepts
Course enrollment
This is an object in the database that compiles all of the concepts reviewed below as well as other Student Information. This can be surfaced in the “Course Enrollments Analytics” page in your Dashboard.
Course registration
A static date and time stamp based on the time the student registered for the course. Students can self-register for a course by clicking the purchase button on the “Course Detail” page, using an auto-registration link provided by your team, or can or can be registered directly into a course from the “Managed Students” section of the Dashboard.
Course progress
A variable percentage of a course that a student completes. You can calculate course progress as:
Course Progress = (# of completed lessons / total number of lessons)*100
Course completion
A static status granted at the time when a student has completed all of the required lessons in a course.
Once a course is marked complete, if the course structure has changed (+/- lessons), completion is static. However, course progress will change depending on the above calculation.
For example, a student completed the course on 1/1/2019 by completing all 3 out of 3 lessons. On 2/2/2019, you add a lesson to this course. The student's course completion will still be marked as complete, however, their course progress will now show 75% complete (they completed 3 out of 4 lessons).
Course completed at date
A static date and time stamp based on the time the student completed the course (see “Course completion” above).
Lesson completion
For most content types (Text Lesson, Embedded content, etc.), a lesson will be marked as complete in the Database (and in Salesforce, if you have this integrated) as soon as the first time the lesson page loads. We will review the specifics for each lesson type in the related articles:
- Understand video and audio lesson completion
- Understand text, PDF, and embedded page lesson completion
- Understand quiz lesson completion
- Understand live training lesson completion
- Understand SCORM lesson completion
Generally, for all lesson types, there are settings and variables that can override the default behavior.
- At a course level in Courses > Individual Course > Course Details > Settings: Lesson Navigation, you can choose to “Mark Lessons Complete When Audio or Video is Done.”
- At an individual lesson level in Courses > Individual Course > Course Curriculum > Individual Lesson > Settings, you can choose to Disable Automatic Completion or Add "Requires Validation".
- If you choose to disable automatic completion or Add proctoring Validation review, there are a few options for completing these lessons on behalf of your students:
- Dashboard: An admin can mark the lesson complete in the student’s profile page of the dashboard. Learn more: Editing a Student's Lesson or Course Progress.
- API calls: You or your development team can write API calls can to mark a specific lesson complete in Skilljar based on an outside trigger (e.g. doing a task in your application). Learn More: Marking Lessons Complete from External Services
Latest activity
The date and time stamp from the last time a student was active in a lesson.
Certificate
An official document attesting to and granted upon a Course Completion event. Learn more: Issuing Certificates.
Once a certificate is granted, the details of the event are not dynamic or changeable. We view this as a physical document; once we grant the certificate, it's static unless changed in Skilljar manually.
Lesson completion by lesson type
There are five main types of lessons, each with specific lesson completion behavior based on different triggers and applied settings.