openedx-progress

Progress tracking for Open edX students.

This Django plugin materializes learner course completion summaries for Open edX analytics. It stores one row per learner/course pair with the completion counts returned by lms.djangoapps.courseware.courses.get_course_blocks_completion_summary, derives locked units from the unfiltered course structure when available, and uses computed_at for when the values were last computed.

Why this exists

In the LMS progress page, progress, also known as completion, is calculated at runtime as:

units completed / (units completed + units incomplete)

The caveat is that these unit counts do not include units that are locked for that specific learner at that time. A unit can be locked because of visibility controls, dated gates, or other course access rules.

Analytics add-ons such as Panorama often only have the total number of units that exist in the course. They do not have learner-specific detail about how many of those units are currently hidden or locked. As a result, analytics systems can show a completion percentage that differs from the percentage shown in the LMS progress page.

This plugin stores the learner-specific complete_count, incomplete_count, and locked_count values in the summary table. By querying this table, analytics systems can count locked units separately and produce a completion calculation that more closely matches what the LMS knows about that learner at the time the summary was computed.

For an LMS-style completion percentage, use:

complete_count / (complete_count + incomplete_count)

If an analytics system starts from a course-wide total_units value, it can use locked_count to derive the learner-specific denominator:

complete_count / (total_units - locked_count)

In practice, total_units - locked_count should correspond to complete_count + incomplete_count for the same course structure snapshot.

Database tables

This plugin creates two tables.

openedx_progress_coursecompletionsummary

Stores the latest materialized completion summary for each learner/course pair. There is one row per course_id and user_id.

Columns:

• id: primary key.
• created: when the row was first created.
• modified: when the row was last saved.
• user_id: learner user id.
• course_id: Open edX course key stored as a string.
• complete_count: number of units completed by the learner.
• incomplete_count: number of visible, unlocked units not yet completed by the learner.
• locked_count: number of units currently locked or hidden for that learner.
• percent_complete: stored LMS-style completion ratio, calculated from complete_count / (complete_count + incomplete_count).
• computed_at: when the completion summary was computed from edx-platform.

The table has a unique constraint on course_id and user_id, so repeated backfills or dirty-queue processing update the existing learner/course summary instead of creating duplicate rows.

openedx_progress_coursecompletionsummarydirty

Stores a lightweight queue of learner/course pairs that need their completion summary recomputed.

Columns:

• id: primary key.
• created: when the queue row was first created.
• modified: when the queue row was last saved.
• user_id: learner user id.
• course_id: Open edX course key stored as a string.
• reason: short reason why the summary was marked dirty, such as a completion signal.
• attempts: number of processing attempts.
• last_error: last processing error, if recomputation failed.

The table has a unique constraint on course_id and user_id, so a learner can only have one pending recomputation row per course.

Course completion summaries

CourseCompletionSummary stores:

• user_id
• course_id
• complete_count
• incomplete_count
• locked_count
• percent_complete
• computed_at
• created and modified

The stored percent_complete is calculated as:

complete_count / (complete_count + incomplete_count)

locked_count is intentionally excluded from the stored denominator to match the LMS progress page calculation. If the denominator is zero, percent_complete is stored as NULL.

Backfill command

Run the backfill command inside an LMS environment where edx-platform apps are installed:

./manage.py lms backfill_course_completion_summaries

Useful options:

• --course-id course-v1:edX+DemoX+Demo_Course restricts processing to one course. When omitted, all courses from CourseOverview are processed.
• --user-id 123 can be repeated to process specific learners.
• --batch-size 500 controls database iteration batches.
• --sleep 0.5 pauses between batches.
• --dry-run selects learners without writing rows.
• --force recomputes rows that already exist.

Dirty queue

When completion.models.BlockCompletion is importable, the plugin registers post_save and post_delete signal handlers that enqueue learner/course pairs in CourseCompletionSummaryDirty after transaction commit. Process queued rows with:

./manage.py lms process_dirty_course_completion_summaries

Getting help

For anything non-trivial, open an issue in this repository with as many details as you can provide:

https://github.com/aulasneo/openedx-progress/issues

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the AGPL 3.0 unless otherwise noted. See LICENSE.txt for details.

Contributing

This project is currently accepting all types of contributions, including bug fixes, security fixes, maintenance work, and new features. Please discuss new feature ideas with the maintainers before beginning development to maximize the chances of your change being accepted.

Security

Please do not report security issues in public. Email support@aulasneo.com.

Disclaimer

Part of this code was developed with the aid of AI tools.