We have a long course which we envisage it taking people a few hours to complete. Whilst yes they can close it and come back any time, if they either choose to power through, or they leave the course open while they go away and have lunch for example and then come back and carry on, in the meantime Moodle will have timed out (two hours) in the other tab (as our courses are forced to open in a new tab in order to display nicely) yet the course window shows no sign of this.
What we discovered today is that once this happens, when you move to a new page of the course the images on that page do not appear (and any subsequent pages you haven’t yet opened). The other problem is that any progress you make in the course since the Moodle window login expired is lost.
What we suggest is a built-in course timer, that can be set to a certain time to pop up and warn users that it has been open for almost that length of time, and that when that time is over this course will not display correctly and any further progress will be lost. (perhaps with a further box that the course editor can use to tell the user exactly what they need to do to rectify this situation.
Moodle DOES give you a timeout warning, but because that is only shown in the other tab where your course was loaded out of, you are unaware until it is too late.
Any other experiences of this?