I just experienced something weird while doing this course:
I have WhiteSource Bolt enabled for my account, which means that every repo I created gets a Pull Request for configuring WhiteSource Bolt automatically created.
In the middle of the activites for this course, I decided to get rid of the WhiteSource Bolt Pull Request, so it would not keep showing up in my Project Board and PR list. The thing is, once I closed the PR, the GitHub Learning Bot took it as the action required to complete the current step of the training and close another PR (for which I hadn't completed the steps yet) and proceed to the next phase of the training.
You can see the bot interacting with the wrong PR here: https://github.com/EduSemensati/release-based-workflow/pull/2
To fix that, I had to go to the right PR (https://github.com/EduSemensati/release-based-workflow/pull/8), reopen it, restore the branch, approve changes, merge it and only then close the PR and delete the branch.
You might want to put a watch-ou somewhere so that the students know about the conflict, as well as think about a long-term fix for this ;)
Facing further issues with this training, see my post at https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Learning-Lab/Create-a-release-based-workflow-stuck-on-step-7/m-p/...
"I just got the same issue. I was not able to approve the changes (problem: author cannot approve their own changes), so I de-activated branch protection and merged the PR. The bot closed it but did not trigger the next step... Reference: https://github.com/EduSemensati/release-based-workflow/issues/6"
Thanks for the report, @EduSemensati! I've opened an issue in the course repository documenting the issue and mentioned you so that you are notified when it's taken up.