How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -
Number of replies: 14

I wonder if anyone can help with this. I am trying to change the "time spent" (minutes) to "time spent" (seconds)" in the dependent on function of lessons.

This is a vital element to all of my courses as I need to document the time spent and cannot allow them to go on with the next course until they have completed watching videos. The videos are randomly timed such 9:32, 10:35, etc... The time spent only allows for whole minutes. I posted this problem in lessons weeks ago and have not gotten a response. Hopefully this is the appropriate forum. Thank you.

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In reply to Simon S

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Rosario Carcò -

If you want to change the according Moodle-PHP-Functions you have to

  • find the desired function
  • change the displayed times using php-time functions
  • if you are lucky you need only change the display format string without any conversions
  • I guess that times in the Moodle Database (logs, etc.) are in standard linux notation (bigint(10) , see php5 time() function:
    int time ( void )
    Returns the current time measured in the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT).

Only a quick shot, as I have only limited time these days...

Rosario

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In reply to Rosario Carcò

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -

Thank you. I will explore this.

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Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Simon,

I don't think measuring the server time between HTTP requests by each user (how Moodle measures elapsed time) is a particularly accurate way of verifying how much of each video each user has watched. The reason is that this doesn't account for the time it takes for the Flash video player to download, the time it takes for the user's computer the inititialise it, the buffer time before the video starts playing and any buffering during the video playback if your server is busy or the user has a slow or intermittent internet connection. It can sometimes take considerably more time for a video to play back than we'd expect.

If you really want to get the exact time in seconds, you'd need to measure the elapsed time in the Flash client and the video player playhead position when playback stops. This would require some significant development work in both Flash (a custom video player) and PHP (a custom service script to record the video playback data in Moodle). Alternatively, deploying your video as a SCORM activity should enable some user tracking capabilities.

There's also nothing to stop users from turning down the sound and doing something else while the video is playing and nothing to guarantee that the user was paying attention or understood what they were watching. Personally, I think there are more effective ways to ensure course participation.

Just my €0.02!

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Mike Smith -

Hi Simon,

Hope you don't mind me adding a comment here. 

I have a similar need to yourself in needing to keep track of user's time spent on activities in Moodle, and we have most lessons based on video segments.  However in doing the final user testing we found large differences in the variables mentioned by Matt here, and these were mostly beyond the user's control.  Furthermore, it would be two pretty common practices that a user waits till a video totally downloads in the player, or they use a donwload manager and play it offline.  Especially so if it is over 5 minutes or so.

In all cases you have little control and poor measurement of the time taken to view a video.

Sorry for appearing a bit negative, but if you come up with a good idea would you please post it here as I've been wrestling with it as well.

Good luck!

Mike Smith

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In reply to Mike Smith

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -

Hi All,

Thanks for these replies. It seems I finally found the right forum for this discussion (I have been trying for over a year!).

For my particular situation, I can't be concerned with whether users want to be dishonest and not actually sit or pay attention. That is on the learner's side. I can only make a best effort to verify to the boards that they were engaged with the entire credit hour for a full 50 minutes.

To do this for now what I have done is the following: I have set up all of the videos for the entire 4 credit course as independent lessons in one course, each dependent on the amount of time for the previous video (rounded down to the minute or 5q quiz). In order to make sure they are engaged, I have set up a one question quiz after each 8-12 minute video (which gives them a grade for each lesson) and a five question quiz after each 50 minutes worth of videos (the five question quizzes are dependent on the previous video). I really thought this would cover my need to verify them.

However, I did not realize this other piece of the problem, that lessons only were in "whole minutes." If I knew that I would have made sure the videos were cut into whole minutes. As it stands now it would be cost prohibitive to recut all of the videos (as there are 12 credits hours).

I have tried to work around it by making each five question quiz last 2 minutes. This is not ideal because users will have to wait around for each quiz.

I have asked my developers to look at the suggestion above by Rosario. It seems difficult.

Matt if you have other suggestions to hlep to meet my requirements, I would really appreciate it.

I realize this style of teaching is not within the moodle philosophy. But dealing with boards, certifications, and government agencies, we don't have the luxury to choose our pedegogy.

All my best,

Simon

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In reply to Simon S

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Rosario Carcò -

>>I realize this style of teaching is not within the moodle philosophy.

That's the point. Moodle is participative, selfpaced, selfconscious, indipendent, every learner is self-responsible, good intentioned, constructivist, etc. etc.

And trying to track user activities too deeply is at the limit of privacy. The german Moodle-Forum has a whole discussion thread on all the things teachers may do (track down) and things they should not even be able to see in the Moodle reports because it's against privacy of the students...

And as Matt correctly states, you can hardly measure on your server things that have to travel through the internet first and do run on the students client machine where the user can pause the video while eating or drinking or answering a phone call. As you know, http is a STATELESS protocol, so the server only serves the data entirely or in chunks and then the connection is dropped. To overcome these problems PHP offers session handling, so the Moodle server gets a chance to "know" a user has already logged in and is doing this and that, so that activities can be collected in the mdl_log Table of the database. But beyond that any tracking in terms of time is difficult and maybe unreasonable and might be solved by a proper paedagogical model or measures.

Rosario

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In reply to Rosario Carcò

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -

Thanks Rosario. I certainly appreciate that. That is why most of my efforts entail creating compelling and interesting course material so that the learner is engaged. Beyond that I am constrained by the certification process.

I am still not sure how to address the problem based on your first response above. I don't know that my developers know enough. Can you recommend anyone who could do this for me? I just need to set the time dependency more specifically. I wish it were easier.

Thanks.

Simon

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In reply to Simon S

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Rosario Carcò -

Unfortunately I have little time these days as our new semester/year is going to start and I have a lot of new students to be introduced into our ICT-Environment.

There are official moodle partners you can find on moodle.org and that you can engage to solve a specific problem by programming it for you.

I will not find time to do it because I have other Moodle programming projects running (siteNavigation and myCourses and uploadusersandcourses you can find in these forums)

Hmm I just had a look at the mdl_log Table which shows this:

Full Textsidtimeuseridipcoursemodulecmidactionurlinfo
  Edit Delete 8277235 1304434728 13710 87.102.141.119 4400 course 0 view view.php?id=4400 4400
  Edit Delete 8277233 1304434722 13710 87.102.141.119 1 course 0 view view.php?id=1 1
  Edit Delete 8277234 1304434724 13047 178.192.91.49 4628 journal 121887 view view.php?id=121887 204
  Edit Delete 8277203 1304434678 11610 87.102.131.169 4154 course 0 view view.php?id=4154 4154
  Edit Delete 8277204 1304434678 13690 178.198.173.220 4631 user 0 view view.php?id=13690&course=4631 13690

So the time here is when the user started the given action. But no hint on when he stopped or finished. Which, coming back to your video again, is impossible to tell and to track anyway.

So I do not see any possibility to "measure" any time spent on activities. The only "pedagogical" trick would be to set up everything into a LESSON activity, where you can control the flow by quizzes. Sort of

chapter/theme one -> video one -> quiz/questions on video one

-- Lesson control -> chapter two can only be entered if the student reached 80% score of quiz/questions on chapter one

chapter/theme two -> video two -> quiz/questions on video two

-- Lessson control -> chapter three can only be entered if the student reached 80% score of quiz/questions on chapter two

and so on

This would allow you to estimate times to be spent on each video and quiz and would give you enough entries in the  Moodle reports and mdl_log Table (you can sort and reduce to single students with sql-queries, if you were interested more in raw numbers to copy/paste or export into excel or csv text files for further processing, rather than in Moodl's neat Report-Display)

Rosario

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In reply to Simon S

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Mike Smith -

Hi Simon,

Yes, sometimes you do need to satisfy certification requirements against time engaged on a course.  In Australian VET (Vocational Education and Training) courses, the course approval itself (for registration and audit purposes) partially depends on how many contact hours it provides.  So training organisations need to prove students are actually engaged for that time.

This gets up my nose as a teacher because it totally ignores the quality, or otherwise, of a teaching hour  (or worse, a self-paced learning hour) and treats them all the same regardless.  As a compliance officer, hours are much easier to add up (and audit against) than knowledge (which leads us to the quality of assessment - and what a viper pit that is.)

Another way to keep the bureaucrats at bay is with disclaimers.  So we can ask the student, at the end of their course, to verify the number of hours they have engaged.  Auditors seem to like bits of paper with signatures on them.  In Moodle you can do this with a survey or feedback activity.

I know that Moodle is fundamentally designed in the constructivist pedagogy, but even universities operate in a world of compliance and regulatory frameworks.  Using Moodle for professional training and assessment, as we do, takes us further into that world.  I think it can still be done, but more likely the learning/assessment tool set of which Moodle is but a component will need to bend before the regulatory framework does.

Cheers,

Mike Smith

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Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -

I may have found a moodle partner that will build a custom version of the Lesson module to deal with this issue. Seems like a great solution. Will keep you posted.

Best,

Simon

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In reply to Simon S

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Rosario Carcò -

As I said, the mdl_log does not offer such "elapsed time", but I know that quizzes can be timed, ie the students get only a certain amount of time to solve it.

So there is a "time measuring" mechanism that could be implemented also in the lesson module. But again, guiding the students through a lesson with quizzes and controls not to go ahead until reaching the desired score, is already enough of a measure, and it is more on the qualitative side than on the time spent...

Rosario

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In reply to Rosario Carcò

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -

Thanks so much Rosario.

That is exactly what I have done. Everything is set up as lessons  but instead of a grade to allow them to go to the next video, they have to have spent the amount of time in the previous video.

This is the only way I can do it. I cannot allow someone to get through the program without spending the time (such as getting a failing grade because they didn't stay long enough) because these are professionals recieving continuing ed credits. Thus it is my business and I want customers/students who are happy with the process. And as little hassle for them as possible (such as telling them they have to go back and do it again because they didn't stay long enough).

So it looks like this moodle partner will build a new module for lessons for me. One that tracks the seconds in the time spent dependent on function.

They say it will take them about 6 hours to program.

Thanks.

Simon

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In reply to Simon S

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Rosario Carcò -

>>They say it will take them about 6 hours to program.

Oh great, then they are really good professionals and do know the lesson module very well. It would be great if you could share this version (or the code additions) with the whole Moodle-Community. Maybe others are interested also and can help you fund this project if needed.

Rosario

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In reply to Rosario Carcò

Re: How to change "time spent" (minutes) to (seconds)?

by Simon S -

I would be happy to share it. I will check with them about it as we are working out the contract now! I am so excited!

Best,

Simon

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