Thank you again for your replies - indeed, I myself prefer the page hit format as a reliable indicator of user/course interactivity (or is it user/site interactivity?). In any case, let me further clarify the circumstance under which my orginal question about time logging was asked.
Here in California, this campus is considering a Moodle deployment, rather than the oddball mix of Blackboard, WebCT, and face-to-class Netmeeting sessions - the choice of which is often defaulted to the 'easiest', depending on the computer savy and time of the relevant faculty member. It was recently asked of me by the administration (actually, a senior committee member relayed the question to me from the Dean's Office / President ), that they assured me the State would pay the college by the hour they are active in the online class - all that was required was a report built from logs showing each registered student and how many hours they were logged into the class/course. I was told this only applied to Non AA/AS, BA/BS courses (I'll refer to them as non-degree certificate courses). So , for example, the student Bill spent 32 hours in course CF101, and student Anne spent 20 hours in the same course - then the fees paid to the college district from the state would be greater for student Bill then for student Anne. No one (including apparently the state dept in charge of recieving the bills for this service) seems concerned that just staying logged in while surfing on the beach would produce much greater total hours of attendance - what matters to them is how long, in hours per 18 week course, each student is logged in. They either pay by the hour, or a flat rate per student per course- and the current administration seems to feel that pay-by-hour would produce greater income (ie, more IT resources for the campus? <yeah right,insert silly grin here>).
So this is why I am trying to come up with a way to log or export from the database, user time logged in.
Am willing to enterain any and all suggestions - such as, what (if any) database fields would be appropiate to query?
Thanks all for your input!