What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Ankit Agarwal -
Number of replies: 14

We are working on a new Event monitor report for Moodle 2.8 (see roadmap).

The report allows you to subscribe to various Events in Moodle. We have put up a specification page explaining the report here.

We would be really interested to know what are the events you would be interested in monitoring as well as any other suggestions or comments you might have on the report.

Thank you!

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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Ankit Agarwal -

We have setup an prototype site for people to test out this report:-

http://prototype.moodle.net/eventmonitor/course/view.php?id=2

Login details

Student accounts

s1/test

s2/test

s3/test


Teacher accounts

t1/test

t2/test

t3/test

You can manage rules as a teacher by going to  Course admininstration > Reports > Event monitor > Manage rules

You can manage subscriptions as a student/teacher by going to  Course admininstration > Reports > Event monitor > Manage subscriptions

You can manage how these notifications are delivered to you as a student/teacher by going to My profile settings > Messaging

Please note, this is a very early prototype and is expected to have some rough edges.

Thank you

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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Séverin Terrier -
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Hi,

These prototypes are good things, allowing to see how things looks, which is easier than reading a long description.

This is lot more easy/better for people where english is not the primary language smile

I've just taken a quick look, and it seems promising.

Séverin

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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Mark Andrews -

Hi Ankit,

Thanks for putting this up - from my brief play with it on the prototype site it looks really promising - Slightly surprised that you've only got one other comment so far as it seems to be exactly the type of function loads of people have been asking for. 

My only concern is that it's possibly getting even at this stage a little too complex for the average admin/teacher/student who will want notifying about everything in an elegant manner.

Additional items that would be useful in our context (and possibly to others) are:

  • Ability to add rules at site level - eg. for all forums in sites i'm enrolled in, perhaps only allow students to modify setting at site level (for all courses they are enrolled in).
  • Ability to set-up default settings for all students - If student A gets notified about forum posts but Student B does not we would have complaints.
  • For consistency I would move away from having teachers define there own message templates (or make it an advance option), students will be working across different courses and possibly receiving lots of notifications short, sharp and consistent is the key.  Perhaps we could construct a useful default for notifications based on the settings in the rule.
  • Really important: The notifications need to have a link back to what they are being notified about ie. If there are 2 new posts in a forum - link to the forum concerned, if a file has been updated - link to the file in the notification
  • Not really an additional item, but, students and teachers are really used and primed for getting elegant notifications via social networks, websites and apps so the output needs to look professional and constant (possibly fun) to my mind this would mean having a nice email template that has good formatting in it - a default would need to be shipped with the code

Question:
  • Am I correct that the user can then consume the notifications as they wish? mobile, rss, email etc....
  • If selecting email as a notification method, do all the notifications get bundled into one email? if not it would be useful to have this option, so students & teachers) are not overburdened with notifications.

I hope these comments are useful, really happy to be of help and test further if that would be useful.

Mark

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In reply to Mark Andrews

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Ankit Agarwal -

Hi Mark,

Thank you for your comments.

Additional items

  1. In the current design, we are planning an ability to add rules at the site level. However it won't possible to subscribe to a rule at site level for all courses. For example, say you can create a rule called "Active forum" at site level, and that would make it avaialble to be subscribed to, in all the courses. But you still will have to subscribe to a rule through a course.
  2. That is a nice idea, we can have "Forced subscriptions" concept. It is not in the current spec, but surely sounds like an interesting concept, that we can consider.
  3. We would be providing a reasonable default that ideally would contain the rule name, description, links etc. And if you are an advanced user you could customise this as per your needs.
  4. The messages will contain those links for sure. 
  5. Perhaps am misunderstanding this, but won't this template be the same as configured while creating the rule?


Question:

  1. Yes you are correct. You can consume these through any messaging output plugin. By default we ship (email, popup, air notifier, jabber), obviously you can install any third party one you like. This is exactly like any other message in Moodle.
  2. This was discussed in our planning meetings as well. This feature really needs to be a part of core Moodle messaging system as a lot of other places can benefit from this too. I have created a tracker issue for this MDL-46128. Please feel free to vote/comment on the issue.

Again, I would like to thank you for your interest and feedback. Please feel free to post any other questions/suggestions you might have.

Cheers

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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Mark Andrews -

Hi Ankit,

Many thanks for your detailed response to my questions and for creating MDL-46128 - I have added to it.

In response to my responses smile

Additional items

  1. Whilst I understand the reasoning here and that this seems to be the model that moodle uses across other tools. I would imagine that many students/teachers would want the same settings on all their courses so the process of having to go into each course to modify their setting could grate somewhat. To be honest - given this fact I would probably set a default level for our users and not allow them to modify it as allowing them to do so could cause confusion - I would be keen to have this view challenged though by others!
  2. Would be great if this could be included - hopefully if sensible defaults are set all the users would be happy and not feel they needed to configure it, would go some way to negating my previous issue
  3. Great!
  4. Great - wo ho!
  5. I guess this could be another issue (not with this development but moodle more widely) at what point does moodle define how it formats a message? is it done in the tool or by the messaging system? So ensuring that the message sent is suitable for the medium that is receiving it.
    The reasoning here is that for a push notification you may just want a short sentence and link but for a daily digest email you may wish to have a more vobose message with images, links and more text. 
All the best

Mark


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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Dan Poltawski -

One thing that struck me here is that I wouldn't be that keen to receive these notifications as messages, but would love to see them as an activity stream.. Crazy idea: Maybe someone could make a message output plugin which receives the messages and turns them into an activity stream block for a block on the  the mymoodle page  wink

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In reply to Dan Poltawski

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Mark Andrews -

Hi Dan,


I agree, from various chats with people at moodle moots and online I think having a message output 'Activity stream' would please a lot of people. 

cheers

Mark

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In reply to Dan Poltawski

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Ankit Agarwal -

Thanks Dan,

There were two suggestions put forward in the initial planning. 

  • An activity stream style block
  • An notification block, something like facebook, where you see number of notification somewhere on the nav bar and then click on it to get further details.

But unfortunately due to other commitments we decided not to work on those this cycle, but surely this would be a great feature for future improvments.

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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Stuart Lamour -
Picture of Plugin developers

As a student when i log into a VLE i want to be able to monitor what tasks i have to do next, and have some meta data on if i have completed the task or am in the process of doing so.

In the moocs i take this is always pretty clear but moodle seems to obviscate it for some reason.

Same goes for if something i submit gets feedback.

As a tutor i want to be able to monitor that students have submitted/completed, and what i need to give feedback on.

None of this should be optout-able as far as i can see.

A simple global UI of this basic functionally would seem a core part in any VLE/LMs, so underlying architecture should support it by default.

Is this what you wanted to know or outside scope? 




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In reply to Stuart Lamour

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Daniel Neis Araujo -
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Hello, Stuart


you have exactly this feature in the http://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Course_overview_block

Maybe some administrators disable this block or substitute it with a simpler one because (as far as 1.9 time) it may impose a heavy load to usear enrolled in many courses.

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In reply to Daniel Neis Araujo

Logging and events system - something for students?

by Mark Andrews -

Hello,

Now that the events system is in the wild and looking really good - has any discussion or plans been made about how we might use this system for notifying students of events? from what I have seen and read about the events system it's been designed, at least for now, primarily for administrators and system admins.

Would it be within the scope of 2.9 planning to think about how it might be extended for learner use? items that would be great for learners would be:

  • an activity stream, style block on the homepage (as Dan previously mentioned)
  • a really simple interface that enables students to set up monitoring, arguably the current more detailed one would be overkill for students - perhaps a starting point could be one that an admin sets up and propagates out to all student users across the site

All the best

Mark



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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Ralf Hilgenstock -
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I've played with the event monitoring a little bit. Its  a great tool.  Here are some improvements from teacher perspective:

  • Monitoring is based on absolute numbers of events during a time frame. Messages are send if the number has been reached. A teacher may be interested to get a notification if nobody  or only a few of students did an activity. This  is mostly a sign for inactivity and a teacher has to be active I.e. Less than 5 students did a quiz during last two days.
  • Make it easier to define time frames. Add hours and days for defining tresholds. I.e. more than 10 assignment submissions during 1  day.
  • There are small and huge courses in Moodle systems. The absolute number of  events is significant only in relation of the number of students often. Idea: Less than 20 % of students/more than 70% of enrolled students did something during last three days.

Its added to tracker in MDL-48417.

Just one more  question. Is a report possible about this:

- Notification if more than 10 students visited the course during last 24 hours?


Ralf


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In reply to Ralf Hilgenstock

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by Ankit Agarwal -

Thanks Ralf for the suggestions and creating the tracker issue.


- Notification if more than 10 students visited the course during last 24 hours?

You can set a notification alert for 10 visits to a course in last x hours, however at present it is not possible to monitor "10 student visits"

Thanks

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In reply to Ankit Agarwal

Re: What events would you be intrested in monitoring?

by John Provasnik -
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A parent's point of view -- "I'd like to be able to subscribe to a daily report of what my child is submitting each day instead of rooting through the Moodle Logs like a crazy person every night." An activity stream that could display something like this was  a good suggestion (thanks Dan P).

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