Moodle in English: Another way to indicate recent activity

Another way to indicate recent activity

by Enrique Castro - Saturday, December 25, 2004, 8:21 PM

Hi,
We at the ULPGC virtual campus have introduced some customizations to the Moodle user interface. The Recent Activity block is terrific, but some or our teachers complain that it actually indicates too much information, and can be overwhelming. Many of then have actually disabled it.

We have devised another method to indicate which modules have got recent changes (from last login, as the recent activity block). We are displaying a flag by the line linking to the module instance. Actually, flags are added to forums, dialogues, journals and assignments (but can be easily extended to other modules). A user entering his course sees immediately where there have been recent additions.

Flags are also visible in course listings, so that users can see what courses they should enter and those without changes from last login. You can see the picture below. And you can try our live site as guests (look for "Comunidad" category)

The flags are set by querying the logs in the database, This adds a load, but do not seem very significant. We have a site with >250 courses and 12.000 users and we do not see a degradation in performance or response times.

We have borrowed the idea from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the main institution offering e-learning titles in Spain. They use a proprietary VLE developed for them by Sun Microsystems.

I am presenting this change to ask you all if you consider it valuable. The coding is quite simple and could be incorporated to standard Moodle. Now all is hardcoded but it is possible to add it as a configuration option (at course/site level). The icon indicating the flagged item could be made user-selectable.

What do you think?, are you interested in a packaged form that could be installed in other Moodle sites?.

- Enrique -

Re: Another way to indicate recent activity

by Martin Dougiamas - Saturday, December 25, 2004, 9:04 PM

Your way is pretty much exactly how I always envisioned it should be. approve

Only minor difference was that I was going to align it to the right.

I'm still a little worried about performance, though, so any sort of caching we can do would be a good thing. Are you doing queries for every activity, or for every activity type like Recent Activity does?

Average of ratings: -

Re: Another way to indicate recent activity

by Ger Tielemans - Saturday, December 25, 2004, 9:31 PM

Nice! So please, Zip-eMail-attach or CVS the code!

My only hesitation is that students will not take control over their own learning but will "follow the flag"
(We fear the same effect with our "mark the core-tasks in each section" option we will introduce in the last trimester.)

Average of ratings: -

Re: Another way to indicate recent activity

by Enrique Castro - Sunday, December 26, 2004, 4:02 AM

Hi again,
Essentially, what we have done is adding a new field to the existing array $mods, that holds a list of instances added to the course and their properties (in /course/lib.php). The new property $mods[$mod->id]->recent_activity tracks if the flag icon should be displayed or not.

This new field is populated from a new function making the query for new activity. My original idea was re-use the function already existing to print recent activity within the Recent Activity block, but programmers considered more convenient to add this new function. This function looks like:
(in /lib/moodlelib.php)
function exist_recent_activity($idcourse, $module, $moduleid, $timestart, $userid)
{
global $CFG;
if ($module == "forum")
{
if (!$logs = get_records_select("log", "time > '$timestart' AND ".
"course = '$idcourse' AND ".
"module = '$module' AND ".
"cmid = '$moduleid' AND ".
"userid != '$userid' AND ".
"action LIKE 'add %' ", "time ASC")){
return false;
}
else
{
return true;
}
}
return false;
}

The icon is displayed by the function print_section(...) in the /course/lib.php.

We have modified also other files indicate changes in the courses block and courses listing. I am attaching a zip file with the relevant files. They are based on v. 1.4.0, so are pretty old now, but you can get the idea. Look for comments like
/**/
//ULPGC

to see our modifications. They are really tiny. Our site has many registered users but they are not very active, we do not have lots of concurrent users. I mention this to warning about performance. These changes are working pretty well for us. We would appreciate if any one could test them in another environment. We are open to add new things, like selectable icons, or making this an option in course configuration.

- Enrique -

moodle-ULPGC.zip

Average of ratings: -

Re: Another way to indicate recent activity

by Ger Tielemans - Sunday, December 26, 2004, 8:41 AM

I tryto compare your changes against 1.4.3

In course/lib.php I see your /** marked changes, but also other ones with Spanish comments (I cannot read Spanish, but have the idea that it is about the different views for different type of students.

(Can you compare your changes against the official 1.4.3 release of 17 dec 2004?.... OOPS, I SEE I HAVE TO UPDATE TO DECEMBER 2004 )

Average of ratings: -

General developer forum

Another way to indicate recent activity