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:
6812 sites
1k downloads
209 fans
Current versions available: 5

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

Screenshot #0
Screenshot #1
Screenshot #2
Screenshot #3
Screenshot #4

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

Comments

  • Dan Marsden
    Tue, 22 Aug 2023, 6:03 AM
    Thanks @Amadeusz - great to hear it's been useful... I'm never short of "Plans" smile If you're interested in helping by funding further development feel free to reach out privately and I can provide information on our rates, otherwise if you have internal development capabilities, pull requests are always welcome!! - what would also help is if you report any bugs/issues directly to the github issues tracker - thanks!
  • Ali Hastie
    Mon, 18 Sept 2023, 5:33 PM
    Hi, we are using Dedication block with Moodle 4.1 version and staff are asking about the selection of range of dates, which was there within the previous 3.11 version of the block. They want to filter Start of period and End of period dates but can't do this as there is only Session duration within the new filtering options? Cheers
  • SHAHAB AZIM
    Tue, 19 Sept 2023, 5:11 AM
    Hello All
    I get this message:
    Time spent calculation task has not run yet.
    Any suggestions?
  • Dan Marsden
    Wed, 20 Sept 2023, 8:02 AM
    @Ali - there is a session start filter on the user report but not on the main listing - probably not too difficult to add back in place at some point - can you please create a tracker issue in the github issues tracker for this (pull requests are always welcome!)

    @Shahab - see item 2 in the readme: https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-block_dedication#moodle-4x-updates - make sure your cron is running regularly to generate the data needed.
  • Dan Marsden
    Wed, 20 Sept 2023, 8:04 AM
    @ali - I just remembered why that was missing - see: https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-block_dedication/issues/61, we need https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-76392 fixed in Moodle before we can add this back.
  • Ali Hastie
    Wed, 20 Sept 2023, 4:02 PM
    Thanks Dan, one comment on teacher asking admins to create custom reports - For us, this would be an extremely heavy load on our Moodle admins with our teachers asking for such reports within many (100's) course areas. Would be ideal for them to filter like they did previously. Cheers.
  • Dan Marsden
    Wed, 27 Sept 2023, 9:42 AM
    @Ali - keep in mind that the site-admin usually creates custom reports and then makes them available to users / teachers as required. If you would like to fund the work to get MDL-76392 fixed in core feel free to reach out privately.
  • sydney wei
    Fri, 20 Oct 2023, 11:40 AM
    Hello!
    I have installed the plugin and now I see the block say:
    Dedication
    Time spent calculation task has not run yet.

    What should I be doing now in order to have this task run and generate the report?
  • Dan Marsden
    Tue, 24 Oct 2023, 9:26 AM
    @Sydney - the data displayed by the block is now generated using a cron task. Please ensure you have your scheduled task process running correctly and it should generate the data you need.
  • Javier Pardo
    Sat, 18 Nov 2023, 8:49 AM
    Hello, I have been using this plugin for several years and everything has worked perfectly.

    Today I updated my Moodle from version 3.10 to version 4.0 and I see that the plugin does not look the same as in previous versions.

    Now only the session start and session duration appear in the session duration report, but not the student's connection IP.

    To see the IP information you now have to enter the total report of all entries, but it is not represented in the classic way that this module did in previous versions, but rather in the form of Moodle reports.

    On the other hand, when downloading the report in Excel, the entire session record does not appear. I have realized that when applying filters they do not work correctly, since when checking the option to filter only sessions with a login, many sessions that do have a login disappear from the list, that is, there are 10 sessions in the list with login date and time but the filter does not detect them correctly and removes them from the list.

    I don't know what could be happening, but I would like to know what I can check to know that the plugin is configured correctly.

    This is another thing that I have discovered that has changed, now the plugin configuration parameters only allow you to configure 3 elements: ignore session limit, session limit and history retention time.

    Has this plugin changed so much in Moodle version 4.0?

    Thank you
  • Dan Marsden
    Sat, 18 Nov 2023, 11:15 AM
    @Javier, yes the design of the plugin has changed and unfortunately we didn't have enough funding to retain all the features of the previous version. Please see the readme file in github for details and also the open tracker issues for future work we would like to do. If you have internal development capabilities pull requests are always welcome otherwise feel free to reach out privately if you are in a position to fund further improvements to the new version. Thanks.
  • Javier Pardo
    Sat, 18 Nov 2023, 4:25 PM
    @Dan Marsden

    Hi Dan, first of all, thank you very much for your clear and quick response.

    It is a real shame that this plugin does not have the necessary support to continue its development. I have been using it for years and it has always worked perfectly.

    The truth is that I never imagined that an update would mean a regression in its functionalities.

    Unfortunately I do not have the necessary knowledge to be able to develop the plugin and leave it at the same level as version 3.10.

    Is there a possibility to install an older version of the plugin in Moodle 4.0? I suppose this will not be possible, but right now if the plugin does not perform at least the same actions as in its previous versions it is almost useless or at least difficult to use.

    It is true that I have not stopped to look at all the changes to the plugin before proceeding to update my Moodle, but when I saw the screenshots that appeared the same as in version 3.10 of the plugin on this same website I thought that the plugin would continue functioning the same as always, with the same options and in the same way as always.

    Does anyone know if there is a good alternative that fulfills the functions that this plugin did before?

    I hope that the programming community can take up this project and continue its development.

    All the best.
  • Dan Marsden
    Mon, 20 Nov 2023, 5:28 AM
    @Javier - thanks for the feedback - I find it frustrating too - especially when I can't the time to do all the work I would like to do in the plugins we support smile - I've just posted a long overdue post about the new version and the compromises we had to make to get this work done in the forums here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=452749 - I'm not in a position to help you try and install an older version in your site - however keep in mind that the API changes, the old version did not support Moodle 4.0 (only 3.11 and lower) and it may contain other bugs preventing it from installing in your newer 4.x site.

    We definitely have plans to continue further improvements to this plugin - I have a long list of things I'd like to see achieved (see the github issues tracker for more info.) - however feature development/improvements are usually funded by our clients or by other developers sending us pull requests.
  • Jorge Machado
    Wed, 6 Dec 2023, 5:25 PM
    Hello, this is a great plugin, thank you but I'm having a lot of problems with it, everytime i update the plugin all the data disappear and sometimes it just disappears even if i don't update it, am I doing anything wrong? can someone help me please
  • Lucilene Pessoa Macedo
    Wed, 13 Dec 2023, 9:24 PM
    Ao instalar o plugin, ocorre o seguinte erro : Instalar plugin de arquivo ZIP
    Validando block_dedication ... Erro
    [Erro] Versão do Moodle requerida [2022041904]
    Instalação abortada devido a falha de validação

    Alguém poderia me ajudar, a versão do Moodle que estou usando é 4.0.2
Please login to post comments