Completion gives students an overview of their progress in the course materials. Each element in Content is marked as completed, either automatically or by the student themselves, so they can always see what they have been through.
“Completed” is the marking that students see for each element in Content. When you create an element, you select how the marking should work: Automatic, where the element is marked as completed when the student opens a page or submits an assignment, or Manual, where the student themselves marks the element with “Completed”.
In addition, an element can be made “Optional”, so that it does not count in the student’s progression overview. This setting is set after the creation of an element.
| Setting | What happens | Suitable for |
| Automatic | Marked when the item is opened or an assignment is submitted | Texts, videos, activities Brightspace itself records |
| Manual | The student marks it themself | Work outside of Brightspace. For example, work in the study groups or other tools |
| Optional | Does not count in the progression overview | Supplementary material and background material |
The marking is a tool for students: it provides an overview of their own work with the course materials and is only visible to the individual - you as a teacher do not have access to this data. Please note that the marking can be misunderstood: “Completed” means that an element has been opened or submitted - not that the material has been learned or no longer requires attention.
Therefore, have a conversation with your students about what the markings mean in your course. You can read how to frame this expectation alignment in [link to pedagogical guidance on progression overview and expectation alignment with Completion].
You can use completion, among other things, to:
Aligning expectations regarding learning in the course
Use the introduction of the markings as an opportunity for a conversation about what learning in your subject consists of. What a check mark means, what it doesn't mean, and when you are truly "through" a material. The conversation can change the perception of the markings from a progress meter to a student's own tool.
Planning Support in Content-Heavy Courses
Set the “Automatic” mark on the course's core material and make the supplementary “optional” so that students in courses with lots of texts, videos, and activities can see what work is expected and how far they have come - and plan their efforts accordingly.
Self-Assessing Activities Outside Brightspace
Select “Manual” marking for work that occurs outside of Brightspace – such as reading, group work, or assignments completed in other tools – so that students can decide for themselves whether the work is actually done before marking. This small decision turns marking into a self-assessment rather than an automatic acknowledgement.
The choice between “Automatic” and “Manual” depends on where the work is taking place. “Automatic” is suitable for material that the student simply has to go through: a text, a video, an information page - and for activities that Brightspace itself registers, such as an assignment or a quiz. “Manual” is suitable for work that takes place outside of Brightspace, such as an embedded third-party tool where the system itself cannot see that the task has been completed - or for situations where you want to focus on the student's own assessment of whether an assignment is complete or not.
Please note that students cannot remove the check mark once the item is marked as complete.
“Set as optional” is suitable for material that is not part of the expected work. For example, in-depth literature or background material. By making it “optional” you clearly signal what is core material and what is extra. The setting is not found in the actual creation of the element, but is set afterwards.
When Brightspace places a checkmark next to course materials, it tells students: this is complete. Yet complete is not the same as learned, and without a shared understanding of what these indicators mean, the overview risks being more misleading than helpful. This guide focuses on the expectation-setting that should accompany decisions about what triggers the “Completed” indicator.
Students who open the Content area of your course see a status marker next to each item: completed or not completed. Taken together, these markers provide a progress overview. They offer a picture of how far students have progressed and what remains ahead. This can be a valuable aid to students' own planning, particularly in courses with large amounts of content. However, the overview comes with an inherent risk of misinterpretation, which is worth addressing at the beginning of the course.
The checkmark borrows its visual language from the world of gaming: the level is cleared, move on to the next one. This is the narrative the system communicates with every single content item, and for students it can be difficult to challenge that message. As an instructor, you know that read does not necessarily mean learned, and it may be important to make this distinction explicit when the interface itself does not.
For this reason, Completion is not merely a setting you configure, but a starting point for a conversation with your students about what learning in your subject entails and how they experience it themselves. When introducing the course, take time to frame what the indicators mean: What does a checkmark signify in this course? What does it not signify? When is a resource genuinely "completed," and which resources should students expect to revisit?
This alignment of expectations is particularly important because the feature comes with the system's own built-in narrative of progress and completion. As the instructor, you are the one who gives these indicators meaning within your course. If you do not, the interface's visual language will do so on your behalf. Tracking without context is surveillance; with the right context, it becomes a student's opportunity to monitor their own progress. Make it clear that the indicators belong to the students themselves, are visible only to the individual student, and are intended to support their overview of their learning journey, not your control.
https://studypedia.au.dk/en/learning-tools/brightspace/brightspace-faq#c842947
Expectation-setting is reflected not only in the conversations you have with students, but also in the way you configure Completion Tracking. A course in which every item requires completion sends a different message from one in which only the essential materials are marked as required. Every time you set an item to Automatic or Manual completion, you are implicitly saying: this is something I expect you to engage with. Every time you make an item Optional, you are saying: this is additional. Consider carefully whether every item genuinely needs to be completed. A progress overview in which everything carries equal weight does little to help students prioritize.
It is important to note that once an item has been marked as completed, the completion status cannot be removed, not even by the student. If you are considering Manual completion for items that students are expected to revisit throughout the semester, this limitation is worth taking into account when deciding how to configure the course.
