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: 6 months

6575 sites

1k downloads

211 fans

Current versions available: 5

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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

Source control URL

Bug tracker

Discussion

Screenshots

Contributors

Dan Marsden (Lead maintainer)

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Catalyst IT

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Borja Rubio Reyes: previous author

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Aday Talavera: previous maintainer

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Comments

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Dan Marsden
Tue, 13 Feb 2024, 3:29 AM
@Paul - you can either add it as a block to a course: https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Block_settings#Adding_a_block_to_a_page

or the plugin also includes a report source that allows you to build your own site-level report with the columns you would like to see:
https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Custom_reports
Paul Grant
Tue, 13 Feb 2024, 4:49 PM
@Dan,

You are a gentleman and a scholar Sir, thank you very much for such a speedy reply. Much appreciated.
Flemming Bornemann
Thu, 22 Feb 2024, 5:05 PM
Hi
Is there a way to add this plugin to all courses?
Dan Marsden
Fri, 23 Feb 2024, 7:20 AM
@Flemming - you might be after something Moodle calls "sticky blocks" which are documented here: https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Block_settings#'Sticky_blocks' but if you're just wanting to report on all courses then the best way to do that is using the "custom reports" (https://docs.moodle.org/403/en/Custom_reports) which includes a report source from the dedication plugin.
Flemming Bornemann
Fri, 23 Feb 2024, 2:55 PM
Thank you @Dan
I think you are rigt, I want a sticky block. I already looked in to the source you linked to.

For the various options with blocks they provide step by step guides on how to do. But for the one I need it just states this:

"Making a block sticky in a category
A user with category rights might for instance wish to display a Remote RSS feeds block in all of the courses within a particular category, such as a Head of Science adding Science news feeds to the Physics, Biology and Chemistry courses."

But no directions on how to achieve it. Can you help?

Tanks again.
Flemming
Dan Marsden
Fri, 23 Feb 2024, 4:10 PM
@Flemming - best to create a new post in the forums - the comments here aren't ideal for general moodle support - thanks!
Juan Antonio Moreno Carmona
Sun, 3 Mar 2024, 2:46 AM
Hi Dan. Thank you very much for your plugin. I wonder if the plugin also computes the time spent in the course when the user enters a course from the mobile app. Some users complain that all the time spent on the course does not appear. And those users use the app from time to time.
Dan Marsden
Thu, 7 Mar 2024, 2:02 PM
@Juan - the plugin generates the time-spent using Moodle logs table - not all interactions within the mobile app will generate a log entry associated with the user in the logs so we are limited to the usage that generates data within the logs. Students and staff should treat the time-spent calciulations as informational and a general approximation, it is very hard to improve the accuracy of this data. We do have other future improvements we'd like to make that would improve the stats and we could also look to include mobile app usage within this as well, but we'd need likely need someone to fund that development effort - feel free to reach out if you are that organisation who has the funding to put towards tihs!
Aca G
Wed, 20 Mar 2024, 2:22 AM
Hi, great block. In Spain the state-subsidised courses require a record of the time spent, so this block is widely used. Without it we would not know what to do.
Any idea why a course that used to show correctly the time spent by each student now seems to have been "reset" and counted again from zero?
Aca G
Wed, 20 Mar 2024, 2:38 AM
I add to the previous message:

could it be because it is affected by the general "logstore_standard | loglifetime" time settings ?
Dan Marsden
Wed, 20 Mar 2024, 5:18 AM
@Aca - there's a site wide setting called "allloglifetime" in the admin> blocks > dedication that clears out older logs so if you have that set low then yes, it will clear out data used to display how long the student would have spent in the course, not sure what else would do it.
Macrocap E-Learning
Sat, 11 May 2024, 3:38 AM
Greetings, first of all, thank you for your work to improve the efficiency of our platforms. My question is about a modification that was made to version 4 of this plugin (latest version), and it is that students who have not entered or participated in the course can no longer be seen in the report, since it ignores the sessions less than 2 minutes...based on that, is there any way to modify the plugin code to make that data appear again?...what would be the file that should be "intervened"?...we thank you in advance for your response, best regards.
Dan Marsden
Mon, 13 May 2024, 5:56 AM
@Macrocap - that's a site-level admin setting that you can definitely change - unfortunately it doesn't currently re-caclculate the historical data when you make the change, but you could manually delete the existing data and run the CLI script included within the plugin to regenerate the data manually.
Giacomo Coletta
Wed, 15 May 2024, 6:46 PM
Hi Dan,
Could you please elaborate more on the answer you gave to Macrocap?
To remove any minimum session duration, do you need to set "Ignore session limit" to 0 minutes?
Morover, how do I manually delete historical data?
Thanks for your time
Dan Marsden
Thu, 16 May 2024, 9:32 AM
@Giacomo - yes - setting the ignore session limit to 0 minutes will only affect "future" data and not existing data already generated.
You will need an experienced user to delete the data within the dedication tables using a sql query and that understands how to run CLI scripts - the dedication plugin includes a CLI script that allows you to re-generate data. If you work with a Moodle Partner they should be able to help with this.