Moodle plugins directory: Course dedication | Moodle.org
Course dedication
NOTE: This plugin has a new maintainer.
Thanks to the University of Canterbury for sponsoring the upgrade work to support Moodle 4.0 and the new report builder API.
Introduction
This block allows to see the estimated dedication time to a Moodle course by the participants of the course.
How dedication time is estimated?
Time is estimated based in the concepts of Session and Session duration applied to Moodle's log entries:
- Click: every time that a user access to a page in Moodle a log entry is stored.
- Session: set of two or more consecutive clicks in which the elapsed time between every pair of consecutive clicks does not overcome an established maximum time.
- Session duration: elapsed time between the first and the last click of the session.
Features
This block is intended to be used only by teachers, however the block can be configured to show dedication time to students too.
Teachers can use a tool to analyse dedication time within a course. The tool provides three reporting methods:
- Dedication time of the course: calculates total dedication time, mean dedication time and connections per day for each student, which you can filter by course group if required.
- Dedication of a student: detailed sessions for a student with start date & time, duration and ip.
- Report builder source: The plugin includes a custom report builder source to allow for site-level reporting to be generated.
Credits
Original developed by Aday Talavera, CICEI at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University
Updated to support Moodle 1.9 - Moodle 3.X by Borja Rubio Reyes.
Support for Moodle 4.0 was sponsored by the University of Canterbury.
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
I was wondering for future features if you might be able to add in a feature for tracking dedication time for meta-enrollments in a course (e.g. student is registered for a Year 1 Course, which then has meta-enrollments for subcourses in Math, Science, History, Art, etc.) so that teachers and case managers could see how a student is doing overall and as helpful data to help coach students. Oftentimes, students are completely unaware of their study habits, and the course dedication block has been a very helpful, data driven tool to help spot trends and habits to help kids build consistency and improve their progress.
Thanks again Aday for sharing your great work with the open source community!
Thanks so much.
If you need to update fast to new Moodle versions, you should try to setup the plugin manually in your Moodle site. This is an easy process. Just download de zip, upload it from your Moodle administration panel and then run the setup. A lot of people are doing the updates this way.
The plugin didn't need any critical code update since the update to Moodle 3.x, so it would probably work without any changes until the release of Moodle 4.x.
My question is because the university where I ask them to install this plugin for the course that I will teach refuse to do it, in reason of the performance of their Moodle platform is... very limited.
Thank you by advance.
However, if you have a course with many students, for example more of 500 or more, in that courses you could have issues with memory or timeouts, because that are a lot of calculations to do to show the dedication time of all the students.
Resolving groups issue would be nice, as well as being able to track meta-enrollments (e.g. have a cohort of students that are then enrolled in multiple courses to track their progress overall or within a course that has sub-courses associated with it).
Very useful tool to help with tracking student progress and great for coaching conferences and parent teacher conferences for those of us with younger students.
I mean a JS that silently calls an Ajax functions and updates the backend with a dummy action.
Then, after a configurable amount of time, it asks the student "Are you still studying", like Youtube does when there are no interactions for some time.