Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Roger Emery -
Number of replies: 11

Not sure where to post this, so I'll start here and move it if anyone finds a better home for it!

I've been looking at the Recent Activities reporting and student tracking in general and wondered if anyone has wanted to do the exact opposite, that being reporting on lack of activity.
The sort of thing I was thinking was sending email/alerts to the particular tutor to inform them that a student hasn't logged on for x amount of time, hasn't attempted an activity or accessed an important resource within a certain time period etc etc.
This would be most useful for being alerted to a student who may be having problems either academically or personally and ultimately be helpful for retention - we could contact a student before they dropped out to help them catch up rather than find out afterwards that they had left.

The systems I have looked at that have some sort of reporting/tracking tools only seem to report on what students have done, not what they haven't.

Anyone got any comments on this idea?

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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by M Y -
I think this is a good idea, I know that at my school when people are send to work on the VLE, some dont bother, instead of email how about using the moodle messenger something like -

The Following pupils have not logged on to your course "DiDA 1":

Job Bloggs
etc

Martin
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In reply to M Y

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Ken Gibson -

Martin (since this old discussion is getting revived big grin),

Have anyone updated this (or put in the feature request) yet?  Having  Moodle send me an e-mail stating:

"The Following pupils have not logged on to your course "DiDA 1" in the last XXX days: "

would be invaluable.

Ken  

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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Richard Treves -
Hmm, interesting idea.

I used to get reports on my tutors marking, i.e. when they got it and how long it took them to reply and they also used to get automatic reminders if their marking was very late.  It caused a lot of annoyance to the tutors because the message (as all emails tend to do) seemed brusque when in fact a lot of them had agreed extensions with the students, allowed under the Open Uni system, and the system had no way of knowing that they were in fact being very professional and weren't just being lazy.

This isn't exactly what you are talking about but I think the principle is the same, providing tutors with a plot showing which students have logged on or not is a great idea ( I think someone has done some work in this area already?) and a good tutor would pick up who is missing and why, triggering a warning email, by comparison, may have unforeseen consequences.

Just my 2p worth. smile

Rich
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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by N Hansen -
This would be easy enough to program if you have the programming skills. The time of the student's last acitivity is recorded in the database and you would just have to have cron run some code that would check those dates to see if a person had done anything lately and if not notify the teacher. Although a teacher could also check this by looking at the list of students and sorting by their last login.
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In reply to N Hansen

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Mary Kaplan -

I think you may be onto something here. Sometimes when students are inactive, there are reasons that teachers would want to know about, but might find out about only much later, missing a chance to extend a helping hand in a timely manner. I have recently been approached by a couple of students who had been thrown out of my site for non-use, asking to be put back in the site, and it let us talk a bit about what was going on with them, and why they hadn't had time to be online. Of course, a teacher can check logs and notice that a student hasn't been on, but sometimes they can fall through the cracks, and a warning would be nice, IMHO.

--Mary

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In reply to Mary Kaplan

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by N Hansen -
What would you say in an email to one of these students? 
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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Stephen Catton -

Hi Roger

Funny enough I was talking to a collegue about this very issue only last week. I think it is an superb idea.... one of those 'why didnt we think of it earlier' moments smile.

Cheers

Stephen

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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by trish edmonds -
Hi all

I think that this is a great idea.  Agree that you can be proactive about problems students might be having without having to trawl through the logs.

Trish
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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Art Lader -
This is a good idea. Has anyone put in an official featrure request?

-- Art
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In reply to Roger Emery

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Clark Moodler -
I see this is an old discussion - but did it go anywhere? Is this still being discussed somewhere else?

I would think something like this would be extremely valuable - with current info and statistics about retention, attrition, and so on. Having more types of analytics built into Moodle - or even an ability to integrate analytics from Moodle with those of a student information system (such as Banner) - so that you can track tendencies, drops, etc. and tie them in with data in the SIS would be incredible.

The ability to incorporate some type of automation that if x and y aren't met, or if the analytics return z event, that an email gets sent to person a, b, c, or all of the above. This is extremely important, particularly at the start of a school term, when the majority of students fall off.

Anyway, just wondering if more work or ideas on this topic are being done.

Thanks!
Clark


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In reply to Clark Moodler

Re: Recent Activities - Alerting Non-Activity

by Art Lader -
I am not aware that anything has been done on this, but it really is a good idea. Thank you for reviving the discussion.

-- Art
Average of ratings: Coolest thing ever! (1)