I was wondering if the chat gives the faculty the ability to concatenate the contributions of individual students. I want to be able to grade students on participation, it would be helpful to be able to automatically sort through all of the chats and parse out a list of all of the contributions for each individual student. Is their any ability to do this sort of thing?
Yes I think this is possible, but you need to be familiar with Moodle's database (and possibly the admin right) to do this. There is a table called "mdl_chat_messages" which you could query upon and sort by userid:
select * from mdl_chat_messages
order by userid;
If you just need "quantitative" data (how many times a certain student "speak up" during a chat session), you could do this query:
select userid, count(*) from mdl_chat_messages
group by userid;
For the MySQL query client software, other than MySQL Query Browser, you could also try SQLyog (http://www.sqlyog.com) which they offer a free version for D/L. Hope this helps.
select * from mdl_chat_messages
order by userid;
If you just need "quantitative" data (how many times a certain student "speak up" during a chat session), you could do this query:
select userid, count(*) from mdl_chat_messages
group by userid;
For the MySQL query client software, other than MySQL Query Browser, you could also try SQLyog (http://www.sqlyog.com) which they offer a free version for D/L. Hope this helps.