Does anyone knows if it exists a solution to track the time spent studying lessons?
Thanks!
Shimoda
Implant a chip in a student?
Not that unreal: In one Dutch pub it is "hype" (or "camp" : what can you do next after all these eyebrow-rings and tatoo things?) to let implant voluntarilly a chip in your arm with your pub-account on it, scannable by the waitress.
(I am not joking this time.)
Dear Shimoda Shimoda,
Good question.
I would like to know how to track this too.
Since my moodle content is mainly tests, I would be enough for me to know just the time spent on tests. There is probably a nifty bit of SQL that would add up the times spent on all the attempts. I will look into it. (I am not sure if SQL commands can add up or not, if not it would be necessary to write some php)
Better still would be the time spent between log in and last page click. The information is there in the databases so it should be retrievable.
What is the content on your courses? What activities in particular would you like to time.
Armed with this sort of information it would be easier to persuade administrators to fund Moodle. They do not realise the hours and hours of torture/study that my students are being put through. If they did their eyes light up, and their wallets open, possible.
Tim
Timothy Takemoto
Ps I am British but I have taken my Japanese wife's name.
Good question.
I would like to know how to track this too.
Since my moodle content is mainly tests, I would be enough for me to know just the time spent on tests. There is probably a nifty bit of SQL that would add up the times spent on all the attempts. I will look into it. (I am not sure if SQL commands can add up or not, if not it would be necessary to write some php)
Better still would be the time spent between log in and last page click. The information is there in the databases so it should be retrievable.
What is the content on your courses? What activities in particular would you like to time.
Armed with this sort of information it would be easier to persuade administrators to fund Moodle. They do not realise the hours and hours of torture/study that my students are being put through. If they did their eyes light up, and their wallets open, possible.
Tim
Timothy Takemoto
Ps I am British but I have taken my Japanese wife's name.
Hi Shimoda, ( I hope I used your first name
)
apart from brain implants or debugging java machine
,
in meantime I use a small hack that permit rought estimate of time use ( not spent I hope ) on all or some activities. A typical display looks like:
You will find some comments and code at these posts.
If you are interested, I use newer code.
I hope it may help,
Bernard
)apart from brain implants or debugging java machine
,in meantime I use a small hack that permit rought estimate of time use ( not spent I hope ) on all or some activities. A typical display looks like:
You will find some comments and code at these posts.
If you are interested, I use newer code.
I hope it may help,
Bernard
In the past we had AICC. You could register that student number 5 took .3 secs more for question 234.b part 7a. What information can you distract from that piece of data?
What I really want to say is that you are - from a SC point of view - moving in the wrong direction: overcontrol and double check. You take the responsibility out of the hands of the student... worse then old fashioned claasrooms..
Even in a positive way: what help could you give to this student with that information? (Products in the eighties - like Authorware - had all this built in, AND NOBODY USED IT)
Moralist remark: Spent your time on developing tools that help students to visualise - in a popup window? - their thinking when they do these lessons or readings..
Hi Bernard!
WP1
- Is there also an area somewhere where you can identify which student it is that is being tracked? For example, is it at the far left of where the image cuts off??
- Do you have a GUI that you can read this from??
- Is there a way to know in what activity/resource time is being monitored?
- I gather that one could put the results in a program like "Excel" and run some statistics to see if some patters emerge?
WP1
Hi WP1,
sorry for the delay, internet excessively slow in Cuba last week!
No functionnality of the normal Moodle log page is cutoff only the image I choose.
Here is another wider one:
You may select any combinaisons with the normal Moodle selector even if some combinaisons are meaningless due to the way time is estimated.
In a future version of the hack, average by student and maybe if I am not lazy, a graph based on Zbigniew work should be more meaningfull to help teacher adjust the "size" of the activities to the time estimated to do them.
I hope it may help,
Bernard
sorry for the delay, internet excessively slow in Cuba last week!
No functionnality of the normal Moodle log page is cutoff only the image I choose.
Here is another wider one:
You may select any combinaisons with the normal Moodle selector even if some combinaisons are meaningless due to the way time is estimated.
In a future version of the hack, average by student and maybe if I am not lazy, a graph based on Zbigniew work should be more meaningfull to help teacher adjust the "size" of the activities to the time estimated to do them.
I hope it may help,
Bernard
Is there a newer version of this?
The "other system" that my university paid to have built was so overfunded that the programmer had time to make a lot of graphs to show most importantly, the length of time that his system forced students to study.
Can Moodle Statistics provide this sort of data?
The "other system" that my university paid to have built was so overfunded that the programmer had time to make a lot of graphs to show most importantly, the length of time that his system forced students to study.
Can Moodle Statistics provide this sort of data?
"Show me in one graph what my students did last 2 weeks in my course instead of all these logs I must study", is what teachers ask.
Students along the vertical axis, activities along the horizontal, cell-color as timeindicator. (with a color-legenda in the corner like altitude maps?)
(or something like the good old GISMO graphs?)
Not exactly time tracing - but shows how much work a student has completed
in a course. The course is divided into chapters, the graph under the heading
Kapitler shows completion/score for each sub-chapter.
The other headings are for Points, Number (of completed), Percent (correct) and time of last update (of score).
This makes it easy to find students who need some pushing ...
in a course. The course is divided into chapters, the graph under the heading
Kapitler shows completion/score for each sub-chapter.
The other headings are for Points, Number (of completed), Percent (correct) and time of last update (of score).
This makes it easy to find students who need some pushing ...
Hi Audun
Is this screenshot a plugin you have created for Moodle?
I agree with some of the (later) comments about the way measurement may be used by organisations without understanding the value (or not) of them. However, for some commercial clients (short competency based trainnig for example) this 'snapshot overview' could be useful.
So is it available as a non-standard bloc for Moodle?
Thanks, Stuart.
Is this screenshot a plugin you have created for Moodle?
I agree with some of the (later) comments about the way measurement may be used by organisations without understanding the value (or not) of them. However, for some commercial clients (short competency based trainnig for example) this 'snapshot overview' could be useful.
So is it available as a non-standard bloc for Moodle?
Thanks, Stuart.
Dear Audun
Thank you for this screen-shot. It looks good for tracking student participation. I am presuming it is part of Statistic, is that right or is it a block as Stuart suggests?
All the same I think that I need a display of *studying time*.
There are people here that may want to evaluate Moodle against another system to see which one forces students to study for longer, in terms of the number of minutes that students are coerced into studying per week.
(Largely in answer to Joseph Rézeau
: Leaving aside whips and electric shocks, failing students is probably the most common way of making sure that students study, and my institution uses that method increasingly, especially since the introduction of a requirement to get a stipulated grade in a recognised test -TOEIC™- as a requirement for graduation. I much prefer the use of a LMS over a TOEIC™ score or final exam. A judicially used LMS can spread out the pain. Students can fail themselves, or study, one mini-test at a time.)
So, some sort of average log in time (minus a final, or any other, timeout), or average total time on weekly tests would be good.
I would not use it to evaluate students, but, having said that, there are some students that just give random answers to tests in a few seconds, whereas others are just bad at tests. It would be nice to see which students are doing both badly, and also doing badly very quickly at a glance.
Thank you again as, as always, I remain in your debt for your course organiser javascript Christmas Present which I am still using as an essential part of course management.
Tim
Timothy > ...failing students is probably the most common way of making sure that students study,...
I suppose that was a slip of the keyboard and you actually meant to write "flailing* students is probably the most common way of making sure that students study". Spare the rod and spoil the child, etc.
Joseph
*to flail = to beat someone or something violently, usually with a stick [LONGMAN Dictionary of Contemporary English]
Hi guys,
Mmm... I think flailing some of my students might help but I don't think I could bring myself to do it.
Anyway, can we make some distinctions between the types of activities that students perform on Moodle? I think this might help with the time-keeping question.
I think of it in two broad concepts:
- Theoretical (or academic) learning where you're studying and trying to understand concepts and ideas. I don't think recording time spent on these activities is really useful unless you're using the "test - teach - test" model (i.e. find out what they don't know, teach it to them, then test what they've learnt).
- Skills learning, which is particularly pertinent to business training and foreign languages. Many skills based activities involve a time element. Basically, the question is, "How quickly can the student process and respond correctly to a stimulus?" The stimulus might be a complex problem that needs solving or merely identifying the correct colour of a flash card. Obviously, a company which is investing in English lessons wants to know that their employees are learning to communicate effectively in a variety of situations, often where timing is critical such as meetings and telephone calls. Showing the guy who's signing your cheques a graph of how well his employees are improving is a good way to prove value for money, which is what a lot of businesses are demanding now.
From the student motivation standpoint, I often measure my students activities not by 'percentage of correctness' but by time taken to produce a satisfactory result. Most foreign language students can write a good reply to a letter or email if they spend enough time on it, but you can't regard them as competent at that particular task until they can complete it within a reasonable time. I'm sure you can all think of a number of other situations where this is also the case.
It's also important that these tasks reflect real-life contexts so that the students are fully aware of why it's important to develop these abilities.
Just my two cents.
Mmm... I think flailing some of my students might help but I don't think I could bring myself to do it.
Anyway, can we make some distinctions between the types of activities that students perform on Moodle? I think this might help with the time-keeping question.
I think of it in two broad concepts:
- Theoretical (or academic) learning where you're studying and trying to understand concepts and ideas. I don't think recording time spent on these activities is really useful unless you're using the "test - teach - test" model (i.e. find out what they don't know, teach it to them, then test what they've learnt).
- Skills learning, which is particularly pertinent to business training and foreign languages. Many skills based activities involve a time element. Basically, the question is, "How quickly can the student process and respond correctly to a stimulus?" The stimulus might be a complex problem that needs solving or merely identifying the correct colour of a flash card. Obviously, a company which is investing in English lessons wants to know that their employees are learning to communicate effectively in a variety of situations, often where timing is critical such as meetings and telephone calls. Showing the guy who's signing your cheques a graph of how well his employees are improving is a good way to prove value for money, which is what a lot of businesses are demanding now.
From the student motivation standpoint, I often measure my students activities not by 'percentage of correctness' but by time taken to produce a satisfactory result. Most foreign language students can write a good reply to a letter or email if they spend enough time on it, but you can't regard them as competent at that particular task until they can complete it within a reasonable time. I'm sure you can all think of a number of other situations where this is also the case.
It's also important that these tasks reflect real-life contexts so that the students are fully aware of why it's important to develop these abilities.
Just my two cents.
I like very much that chart. I have some seemfully charts either that receive "real-time" usage indications of resources and "real reading time" (ajax based tracking) on chapters. (did you heard about "Moodlus Oculi" ? )
Was presented at French MoodleMoot 2007 in Castres.
I fear this is still a bit theoretical approach, conversely to yours, but may be interesting to mix... maybe.
Hi,
In all the years I've been working with another CMS, a common question has been to find out how much actual time a student spends on each page in a module (Book in Moodle, Content Module in WebCT CE, Learning Module in WebCT Vista, Learning Unit in Blackboard). And the answer is basically "can't be done" given the generally "stateless" nature of the Web. The question I will often toss back is "does anyone know how much time a student spends reading each page of a printed textbook?"
Short of sitting next to a student, there is no way to get actual time spent on a page but there are some indicators available in CMSs as mentioned in other messages. For example, in WebCT we can look at Student tracking that shows when a student accessed each page in a content module. If we start seeing very short intervals between the entries for each page, it's a good indication that the student was "clicking through".
But we need to be more realistic in that students read and comprehend at different rates. For those of us "older farts" with bifocals and trifocals it takes longer to read something on a screen than when we were much younger. My concern is not so much "how long?" but "did they comprehend when finished?" For that we can use all the other typical assessment and evaluation techniques.
Cheers,
Bob
These kind of questions turn up every so often and usually, as with Tim's comment above, because the requested 'features' are needed to convince a non-technical, non-teaching bureaucracy rather than for any real benefit to those teaching or learning (often these suggestions will actually harm the learning experience).
Rather than just shoot down each request individually as it comes in, would it be possible to try and collect together some of the very real on-line teaching and learning experience that is present in the community to produce 'position papers' to explain:
- what is actually possible in a technical sense
- what the pedagogic/social impact of implementing such a solution would be
- why Moodle as a community is not investing time implementing this 'feature'
- propose other approaches that would achieve the same goal
I'm not saying that every bureaucrat is susceptible to reason, but having a page to point to with a comprehensive canned answer makes you seem less negative than simply saying "no, that's a stupid idea" or "that'll never work".
So would this crazy idea work? Is collecting the threads addressing these in a wiki a good start? Does anyone have suggestions for commonly asked questions that require a polite "no"?
Dear David, Bernard
Thanks very much for the hack above Bernard. I will definately be installing it at the end of term.
Sorry, David, I should not have blamed the bureacrats. I am interested in the information as well, and I do not think that it is a stupid idea.
I think that from a social constructionist point of view it proabably is a stupid idea. It smacks of control and behaviourism. Also for technical reasons, like the uncopiable test, it is also impossible to achieve perfection.
I am not a social-constructionist. (perhaps behaviouro-social-constructivist?). I think that it is possible to achieve fairly good, approximate data regarding the amount of time that students spend studying on line.
The social constructivists amongst us should probably start the wiki you recommend, but those of us who are not would be advised to share hacks. I know that the mainstream of the Moodle community is not investing time implementing this feature, but I am glad that the Moodle community is pluralist (is that the right word?), and that Bernard is investing his valubale time in this way.
Tim
If you make a version of this function that the student can use to reflect on his own time management behavior, it could become a nice Soc.Constr. tool. (This student is also the only one who can interpretet the meaning of these values..)
Nice idea for a student block?, like this one: http://www.ucc.vt.edu/stdysk/TMInteractive.html
Ger,
Nice idea! It would be nice if student users where presented with these sort of statistics together with class averages.
I think that there is no way that one might be able to whip students into studying more since ultimately the tests of student-studying-time are not 100% (perhaps only 80%) reliable. Really good students might read the materials offline and do the quizes in a twinkling of an eye. If occasionally they get the quiz answers wrong then they should not be penalised as if were answering the quiz at random.
However, just displaying the data, both times and average scores might shame the students into trying harder. "Shame" is a bad word in the West, so how about "increase their public self awareness to the extent that they try harder."
A horrible thought? In Japan till recently they used to display everyone's score, till they imported Western sensitivities and "only one, not number one" education. They used to teach their teenagers to fly into ships too, one might add. To be honest, I think that I approve accross the board.
Tim
Folks
There are two very good reasons for having such a feature.
One is from a course development perspective the content developer can identify where users are pausing or skipping content thus providing clues about where further improvement may be required. Together with assessment results, the time taken to analyse course content becomes a useful guide to improving content quality and usability.
Commercially, the time spent in courses is a valuable metric to the sales person in promoting the value of eLearning to a client organisation. Yes results are important, but time spent on each course AND the desired learning/business outcome are both metrics valued by managers for obvious reasons. Less time spent for better outcomes = a better performing learning product.
Business is less concerned with methodologies and ideologies than results and cost. Time is definitely a factor here.
While there might be reasons one would want to do this, it kind of is like the person who wanted to prevent users from "stealing" material from their course. It simply isn't technically possible. How do you know the time spent on a page wasn't spent getting a snack from the kitchen, visiting the toilet, or chatting with the person sitting next to the student in the computer lab? Or what about students who download materials to read offline, and therefore "click through" pages quickly? Or students who multitask-who might be writing emails, reading CNN, and using the course at the same time? You simply can't account for these factors and get an accurate tally by automating the task.
My experience with another system has been that with enough users there is sufficient evidence to make a valid assessment about how users are working through the course. This is not a micro level analysis of course but you can say with confidence that if numerous users paused at a spot for an extended period I had better take a closer look and figure out why.
It has been pointed out that unsupervised users could be doing anything and I agree. Hands up anyone who's students never played a game or surfed during a lesson.
Anyway, I need to investigate the student activity report as it may provide a similar sort of useful facility.
If you want to identify "where users are pausing or skipping content" then check the individual student's activity report. This does give a good view of where a student clicks and what she looks at. You can even make some guesses at the intention of the student's study approach from these logs.
In this sense too, if you measure the intervals between the student's clicks you can make a point for the _minimum_ time spent on task to get certain results - in a test or evaluation. Doesn't this suffice for sales?
Of course, as it has been pointed out - time on task cannot be measured with present technology. Unsupervised time on task is very difficult to measure convincingably. If you want to deal with this sort of thing related to sales - first, check and see if your customer knows anything about online learning. If they don't - use _minimum_ time on task as a selling point. For those who don't understand online learning, just pile on the hype using scientific terms!
For those familiar with online learning, take care! Anyone who knows their stuff also knows that there is no generally effective way to measure time on task with unstructured activity on the internet.
But, of course, I may be very mistaken
And if you do find a way to measure unsupervised maximum time on task or find a way to supervise online learning please make it open source so that we all can share!!!!
Business and selling asside, any data that we can get from computerized tasks can be usefull. If I find out how much time my students use to complete a quiz I can make judgements about how easy or difficult it is for them to learn from it. I can also use the data to penalize students who go "too fast" or "too slow". (Whatever value that might have.) Having the data itself is not necessarily a bad thing. How we use it? Is it really usefull? How much time should be spent in search of this data is ?????
Dataless Bob
In this sense too, if you measure the intervals between the student's clicks you can make a point for the _minimum_ time spent on task to get certain results - in a test or evaluation. Doesn't this suffice for sales?
Of course, as it has been pointed out - time on task cannot be measured with present technology. Unsupervised time on task is very difficult to measure convincingably. If you want to deal with this sort of thing related to sales - first, check and see if your customer knows anything about online learning. If they don't - use _minimum_ time on task as a selling point. For those who don't understand online learning, just pile on the hype using scientific terms!
For those familiar with online learning, take care! Anyone who knows their stuff also knows that there is no generally effective way to measure time on task with unstructured activity on the internet.
But, of course, I may be very mistaken
Business and selling asside, any data that we can get from computerized tasks can be usefull. If I find out how much time my students use to complete a quiz I can make judgements about how easy or difficult it is for them to learn from it. I can also use the data to penalize students who go "too fast" or "too slow". (Whatever value that might have.) Having the data itself is not necessarily a bad thing. How we use it? Is it really usefull? How much time should be spent in search of this data is ?????
Dataless Bob
The certification module in the plugins database has a concept for time spent in course. It is inaccurate for the reasons posted by many in this thread, but it does do a rough estimate across the entire course. Unfortunately it isn't exposed in a report, it is just one of the triggering options for the course certificate.
I know in at least one case that we have tied to the data from the certificate to create reports, so looking at the code in this module could be a good place to get the proper logic for an estimate of time used.
I know in at least one case that we have tied to the data from the certificate to create reports, so looking at the code in this module could be a good place to get the proper logic for an estimate of time used.