General help

I think the problem here is due to a misunderstanding of how the web works. When a student starts to view a resource, the time is noted. But once they have started viewing it, it is all down at their PC (in their local cache probably), so the web server doesn't know when they stop looking at it. I suppose that you could get the system to take the next time that a page is accessed by that user as the time that they stopped viewing a resource, but that is a big assumption to make.

It is really because of the stateless nature of the web. A page is accessed (which in effect means opening the file, copying it to the PC, then closing it) and then the connection is lost. That's the way the web works. Unless of course you start talking about custom applets (java or active-x) running inside the browser. That's a different container of piscines entirely.