Moodle in English: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Emmerich Anderson - Thursday, November 12, 2015, 1:57 AM

Hello,

I would like to use Moodle for our flight school but there is a requirement so that the teachers/admins can track each student's time spent on the courses/activities (text material needed to be read by students).

As far as I've searched I couldn't find something which would fit this requirement.

I've looked here: https://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Tracking_progress

and also googled a bit but nothing popped-up.

The time spent is considered for the interval where the student had the page opened.

Is there something like this or a similar time tracking plugin/feature?

Thank you!

Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Marcus Green - Thursday, November 12, 2015, 5:38 AM

The short answer is no and the longer is that there is not a lot of benefit to doing it anyway. (I know its not your idea but bear with me).

The web is stateless, it will only ever record when something is requested. If a person goes on holiday, or falls asleep after opening a page with that page it will never record when they "finished" with the page.

Then there is the question of what value it would provide even if you could report on this information. Imagine you have a 20 page document and one person moved through the pages three hours, gradually moving through the pages. Then another person moved through the pages in 30 minutes at an intermittent pace.

Perhaps one person was watching TV and idly clicking on each new page without looking at it, might be the one person or it might be the other. You would not know anything useful.

The good news is that Moodle has the best quiz engine in existence and you could use that to find out if the students have actually learned what you hoped.

I don't mean to be negative, plenty of other people have asked similar questions. This issues around this have been expressed better than I have on these forums previously but I can't seem to find any links at the moment.

Ahh I have just found this one

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=198764

And at the end is this link

https://moodle.org/plugins/pluginversions.php?plugin=mod_attendanceregister

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Emmerich Anderson - Thursday, November 12, 2015, 6:17 AM

Meanwhile I started installing Moodle to a small webserver fort testing purposes and also found this:

https://moodle.org/plugins/view/report_trainingsessions

Indeed, you are right, the idea is kinda silly, I will try to clarify the requirement and maybe have another tracking concept. I knew about the time-boxed quizzes, they are really useful and I will propose those also.

Also, thanks for the other links, funny thing that when I've googled those didn't came up, just some old topic from 2007/2009

Thanks again!

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Marcus Green - Thursday, November 12, 2015, 10:32 PM

I was surprised how hard it was to find comments on this topic as I feel like I have been reading about it for a long time. Learning Analytics is a popular concept at the moment. One of the reasons is that organisations hope to be able to use it to improve retention, i.e. find out why students leave. However there is a certain amount of "snake oil" on the market and misuse of data and statistics.

This presentation from Elizabeth Dalton is interesting and snake oil free

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Vincent Garnier - Tuesday, February 9, 2016, 11:45 PM

Hello Emmerich,

I have worked with the team who originally developed this plugin recently at Edunao to improve it. It is doing wonders. And the team at Edunao has done a great job at making it super smooth. You should contact them.

Vincent

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Mary Cooch - Tuesday, February 9, 2016, 11:53 PM

Hello Vincent. Is this plugin no longer being updated? I notice it only mentions up to Moodle 2.6 only in the Plugins directory entry for training sessions report.

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Vincent Garnier - Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 12:28 AM

I am sure they have an up to date version. You can contact Cyril Bedel at Edunao at cyril@edunao.com on my behalf.

They just modified a feature on mine this morning. But I use an older version of Moodle.

Good luck

Vincent

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Mary Cooch - Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 1:20 AM

Great! But is that a paid-for version? I was referring to the plugin in the directory.

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Re: tracking the time spent by students on course/activity

by Vincent Garnier - Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 2:10 AM

I paid for my updates but you should check with them anyway.

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tracking the time spent by students on course/activity