A colleague had gotten a question about Moodle: "Can a teacher that has several courses in a Moodle site see if there are any new submissions in forums, tests, assignments without going into each course and test and forum etc?"
Forums was easy. The teacher just has do be a member of a forum and he will get a mail about new entries.
The other things I was less sure about, but thought that "Recent activity" on the front page of a course ought to say if anything has happened in a course. I tried (in Moodle 1.7) creating a "Recent activity" block on the site homepage to see if that would show activity in the underlying courses, but it didn't.
I then tried going in as a student and doing some questions in a test. I then re-logged in as teacher to see if the "Recent activity" in the course would show that. It didn't. I went to the detailed activity page and that didn't show the question activity either, which surprised me. I decided to "finish the test trial" (as student) and see if that made a difference. There was still no indication in the "Recent activity" block in the course, but if I went to the detailed activity page there was now an indication that the test had been done (But I had to scroll down to discover it, though there was no new activity above it, just the topic heading where there "could" be activity.
I'm usually "bragging" about Moodles fantastic statistics (as though I had created them
), but this time I felt rather disappointed. I'm wondering if there are any administration choices that could be made, or extensions that could be installed so a teacher could:1) See if any student activity in his courses has taken place since his last login, preferably from one place for ALL the courses he wants (and is teacher for).
2) At least on each course start page that the "recent activity" block would reflect if there had been any student activity in the course.
3) That the "detailed activity report" page would suppress the headings with no activity so one would see directly, at the top of the page, which new activity has taken place.
A colleague would like the possibility to also see if one had sent an manual comments to a test or assignment.
