Course dedication

Blocks ::: block_dedication
Maintained by Dan Marsden, Catalyst IT
This block allows to calculate estimated dedication time of participants within a course.
Latest release:
7250 sites
1k downloads
221 fans
Current versions available: 6

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.

Screenshots

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Contributors

Dan Marsden (Lead maintainer)
Borja Rubio Reyes: previous author
Aday Talavera: previous maintainer
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them

Comments RSS

Show comments
  • Carlos Navarro
    Sat, 17 Aug 2024, 4:12 AM
    Hi Dan, we have upgraded to version 4.1 and we found that it no longer appears to adjust the limit between clicks. Where do I make this adjustment?
  • Dan Marsden
    Sun, 18 Aug 2024, 7:58 AM
    @Carlos, as per the readme, To unify global reporting across all courses, you can no longer set some specific settings within the block itself and can only set them in the site-level settings for all courses/blocks - this fixes various inconsistency issues previously reported and makes it clearer what the setting actually does.
  • syarif hidayattullah
    Fri, 13 Sep 2024, 8:51 PM
    Hi, currently i'm using moodle 4.4. I already installed the plugin and cant find the button to run the task. please help
  • Dan Marsden
    Sat, 14 Sep 2024, 4:58 AM
    @Syarf, best to ask help with using cron/scheduled tasks in the forums.
  • Ivan Muñoz
    Mon, 9 Dec 2024, 5:42 PM
    Buenos días,
    ¿cómo puedo crear un informe como los hacía en la versión para moodle 3.11?

    Uso moodle como profesor sin acceso al módulo de administración para poder crear informes personalizados. Sin embargo, podría pedirlo al administrador.

    Por otro lado, tengo acceso a mi moodle personal donde si soy administrador. Quisiera ayuda para configurar los informes para que me dé información tal como lo hacía en la versión para moodle 3.11 ya que actualicé a 4.4 y he perdido esa función y no puedo ver qué tiempo dedicaba cada alumno al curso.
    Espero que me puedan ayudar para crear el informe. Gracias
    ---------------------------
    Good morning,

    How can I create a report like I used to in Moodle 3.11?

    I use Moodle as a teacher without access to the administration module to create custom reports. However, I could request it from the administrator.

    On the other hand, I have access to my personal Moodle where I am the administrator. I would like help configuring reports to get information as I did in Moodle 3.11, since I upgraded to 4.4 and lost that feature. Now I can’t see how much time each student spends on the course.

    I hope you can help me create the report.

    Thank you.
    Go
  • Dan Marsden
    Tue, 10 Dec 2024, 3:19 PM
    @Ivan - the best place to ask for "help" is in the community forums - hopefully someone else will have some ideas to help - you may not even have this plugin installed in your sites?
  • Ivan Muñoz
    Fri, 10 Jan 2025, 7:23 AM
    Hi again @Dan
    Yes, we have installed the plugin because I can add the block and I can see my dedication time but I can't see the dedication time of my students. Why? The block shows "Complete report". When I click on it, I only see my connections, not my students' conecctions.
    Is there anything incorrect set up?
    Other option is I don´t know how to see the students' report.

    Thanks you
  • Geysson Lima
    Sat, 1 Feb 2025, 4:24 AM
    Hi, @Dan Marsden!
    Congratulations! It's a great plugin! But I'd like to know if we can to get the informations not only of the students and tutors, but of the teacher too, and how can I do this.
  • Josick Guermeur
    Sun, 16 Feb 2025, 6:03 PM
    Hello,

    I am using the new version of Dedication with custom reports.
    The time spent on a course is provided in the standard format when downloaded as a CSV, such as 1 hour 16 min, 2 hours 10 min, or 6 min 50 s, etc.

    Is it possible to change the format somewhere so that it is displayed as 00:00:00 (HH:MM:SS) to allow summing up the durations for a participant in the export table?

    Direct conversion from the table is a nightmare to program, as it's impossible to account for the different formats provided.
  • Dan Marsden
    Mon, 17 Feb 2025, 9:13 AM
    @Josick - good thought! - some other folks have thought it might be worth doing too - see here: https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-block_dedication/issues/83
  • Josick Guermeur
    Mon, 17 Feb 2025, 6:10 PM
    And the solution was found by Christian Bocquet - Sunday, 16 February 2025, 7:11 PM

    Dans le fichier blocks/dedication/classes/local/entities/dedication.php
    en remplaçant la ligne 101 par :
    $format = gmdate("H:i:s", $value);
    ou alors en la remplaçant simplement par :
    $format = $value;
    pour obtenir le nombre de secondes
    Penser à vider les caches.
  • Josick Guermeur
    Mon, 17 Feb 2025, 7:32 PM
    It would be cool to integrate this in the next upgrade maybe in keeping both formatting as rwo different choices for duration
  • Geysson Lima
    Mon, 17 Feb 2025, 10:31 PM
    Hi @Dan! I think I found the reason for the problem I reported. From what I could understand, the user has to be in a group for the tool to work. As teachers are not in groups in some of our courses, these teachers did not appear when we ran the plugin. Problem solved.

    I'd like to suggest as improvements:
    1. the possibility of filtering a user without the need for them to be in a group;

    2. inclusion of a filter where we could select users by role (students, teachers, tutors, etc.).
  • Dan Marsden
    Tue, 18 Feb 2025, 5:20 AM
    @Geysson - please report feature requests to the issues tracker in github - keep in mind that my time to work on feature development as a volunteer is extremely limited. If you have internal development capabilities, pull requests are always welcome.
  • Mikkel Jeppesen
    Tue, 18 Mar 2025, 3:09 PM
    Hello guys,

    one setting im not sure about is the "Session limit" setting. What does it exactly? Cant seem to find anything more explaining than the text below "Session limit for the report page filters" and i cant find out what it means.

    Anyone who knows what i does?
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