Course Manager

Reports ::: report_coursemanager
Maintained by Olivier Valentin
Course Manager report is mainly intended for teachers as a tool for managing their courses and raising awareness of what they store in their courses, if their courses are alive or not… and encourage them to clean Moodle This tool offers for teachers several functions as shorcuts to clean courses and a complete dashboard to manage them. Several reports are calculated automatically and can be displayed directly in courses to warn teachers from possible problems detected. The report is completed by tools to manage courses without teachers and a reset tool for assigns that contain files submitted by unenrolled students.
Latest release:
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Current versions available: 1
Course Manager report is intended for teachers as a tool for managing their courses. Based on native functions as well as other functions specifically developed for this report, its main goal is to raise awarness among teachers of what they store in their courses, if their courses are alive or not… and encourage them to clean Moodle by :

  • opening functions which don’t go against system permissions (such a trash category) ;
  • giving shortcuts function to clean course (reports, bulk uneroll cohorts, simple reinit) ;
  • offering visualization tools to encourage to clean courses.


How does it work ?


Every night, an automatic task will calculate a serial of reports concerning courses storings and courses log actvity. Those reports are shown to teachers in a dashboard, and can be added in each course if chosen.

There are 6 reports :

•    Heavy courses : fix a limit for what will be considered as heavy (in Mo)
•    Empty courses : courses with only native forum
•    No students : courses wihtout any students enrolled
•    No visits : courses with no visits of students, but of teachers too !
•    Orphan submissions : warns teachers if some assigns contain submissions from unenrolled students.

The total weight of course files will also be calculated.


How are displayed reports ?


Teachers can become acquainted with these reports :

  • By seeing them in the Course manager Teacher Dashboard ;
  • By seeing them directly in courses (if enabled by admin) ;
  • By receiving every month a mailing recapitulating courses concerned by reports (if enabled by admin).

What is the Course Manager Teacher Dashboard ?


This tool offers a view of every course a user is enrolled in as teacher (or any other role defined in settings). Each course display informations (visible course, files weight, number of studens and teachers enrolled…), reports list, and offers tools such as shortcuts for :

-    Moving a course in a trash category ;
-    Seeing files weight in course and most heavy activities ;
-    Resetting course with a simplified tool ;
-    Unenrolling cohorts.

The dashboard can easily be filtered for each reports, and a search tool can help to find courses.


Are there tools for Moodle admin ?


The plugin is completed with special tools for admins in Site admin > Report section :

  • Filearea report : calculates files weight according to their file area, that can help to detect problems.
  • Orphan submissions : this report offers possibility to clean assigns from submissions uploaded by enrolled students in a course which is not reinitialized. Those files can represent a very heavy weight !
  • Courses without teachers : this report lists all courses without teachers, and offers a tool to move them in trash category.
  • Stats pages : this page will display statistics about your Moodle instance, based on reports calculted by this plugin.

How to give access to teacher dashbord ?


If you want to give access to dashboard, you must add in navigation, in a block or any other way a direct link to this tool

/report/coursemanager/view.php file. 
This plugin doesn’t add automatically a link in dashboard or course admin navigation !

Suggestion : simply use the custom menu items setting in Admin > Appearance > Theme settings to add an element in main navigation.


Reports displayed in course and templates


Reports displayed in course can be added in two ways :

  • By displaying a serial of icons next to course title ;
  • By adding a collapsed button right under course navigation.
They can also be hidden if necessary.

Those two ways has been tested with several Moodle templates such as Almond, Boost, Boost Union, Classic, Moove and Trema.
Other templates has been tested too, with several behaviors :

  • Themes Academi, Degrade, Eguru and Klass : the icon display mode works, showing a small gap for icons
  • Theme Adaptable : icon display mode doesn’t work, because targetted zone doesn’t exist in this template.


Settings for admin


This plugin offers possibility to set every threshold that will trigger a report :

  • Limit weight for a file or course ;
  • Roles concerned (teacher and student)
  • Number of days without visit for teachers and students
You can also set settings for :

  • Defining trash category ;
  • Activating or not reports mailing ;
  • Modifying mail content ;
  • Selecting the way reports are displayed in courses (next to course title, under course title or none).
All comments are welcome to help improve this plugin. Please use GitHub issues for improvements, bug or others ideas.


Steps for making Course Manager work


  1. Install plugin in report directory (see below for more information)
  2. Create a category called "Trash" or another name : this category will be used to move and store all courses that teachers want to delete.
  3. Defined all settings in plugin settings page. You must define thresholds for course weight, file weight, number of days without visits for teacher and for students. Without these, Course Manager won't be able to calculate reports. Enable reports you want to display or not.
  4. Add a link to teacher dashboard (see "How to give access to teacher dashbord ?" section above)
  5. If you can, manually run scheduled tasks  (\report_coursemanager\task\...) in admin to generate course reports. If you can't, task are automatically trigerred during the night. Then, reports can be displayed in teacher dashboard and/or directly in courses if enabled.

Screenshots

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Contributors

Olivier Valentin (Lead maintainer)
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them

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  • Plugins bot
    सोम, 13 नोभेम्बर 2023, 8:20 PM
    Approval issue created: CONTRIB-9425
  • Luiggi Sansonetti
    बिहि, 4 अप्रिल 2024, 2:49 PM
    Great plugin !
  • Miguel Angel de Pablo
    शुक्र, 5 अप्रिल 2024, 6:02 PM
    Very nice pluging, I have an issue with "Report display in course ", neither of the 3 options see to work (classic Theme and Moodle 4.0.2).

    Also, for improvement, it would be nice to include the "/report/coursemanager/view.php file" as an option in SiteManager/Report/CourseManager. Easier to manage, instead make a block o memorize a link.
  • Olivier Valentin
    सोम, 8 अप्रिल 2024, 3:35 PM
    Hi Miguel, thank you for your message !

    All is fine on my side : all reports are shown in Classic theme. I tested it on a Moodle 4.0.3 version.
    Before reports are displayed, the cron task must run to calculate them. Check the teacher dashboard : if reports are displayed in column, then they should appear in courses too. If there are no reports for a course, nothing appears.

    For automatically displaying link to teacher dashboard, my problem is that it depends on template version, global navigation... I don't exactly now where to push it (and if it's possible !), what would be the best solution... For now, I will wait if there are other propositions in the same way before trying to work on it. Feel free to push your preference !

    Olivier

    Olivier
  • Miguel Angel de Pablo
    मङ्गल, 16 अप्रिल 2024, 3:10 PM
    Hi and thank you Oliver,

    I have other issues like at "Course Manager for teachers" only displays 6 courses. Don'tworry, sure the problem is a conflict with a personalization or another plugin in my installation. I'll look for it.

    Best regards.

  • Olivier Valentin
    मङ्गल, 16 अप्रिल 2024, 3:12 PM
    Hi Miguel,
    not sure ! Can you please activate debug mode and tell me if there's an error concerning SQL request ? Do you have MariaDB or PostGreS ?
    Olivier
  • Daniel
    शुक्र, 7 जुन 2024, 3:12 PM
    Bonjour Olivier,
    Erreur d'écriture de la base de données lors de la tentative de mise à jour de ce plugin sur une PF version 4.2.1+
    Si besoin je ferai un copier/coller du message d'erreur complet.
    Daniel Methot
  • Olivier Valentin
    शुक्र, 7 जुन 2024, 3:14 PM
    Bonjour Daniel,
    je veux bien ! Tu peux m'envoyer un DM sur les forums Moodle.
    Olivier
  • Andreas Schenkel
    बुध, 2 अप्रिल 2025, 9:17 PM
    Will there be a version for moodle 4.5 or moodle 5.x?
  • Olivier Valentin
    बिहि, 3 अप्रिल 2025, 2:55 PM
    Andreas > yes, it's coming ! :D I had little time this year to move the project forward, but I will resume it soon. I have already added some features; I just need to check that everything works fine on Moodle 4.5.
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