Course dedication
Aday TalaveraIntroduction
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, so students aren't going to see it and their dedication time. However, 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 views:
- Dedication time of the course: calculates total dedication time, mean dedication time and connections per day for each student.
- Dedication time of a group: the same but only for choosed group members.
- Dedication of a student: detailed sessions for a student with start date & time, duration and ip.
The tools have a link to download all data in spreadsheet format. The use is restricted by a capability to teachers and admins only.
This block cannot be used in the site page, only in courses pages.
All texts in English and Spanish (AMOS).
Available versions- Moodle 2.0 - 2.6: old Moodle 2 version.
- Moodle 2.7+ / 3.x+: Moodle 2.7 brought a new log system, so the plugin needed to be redone to use this new system. If you have upgraded your site from older versions (2.6 or below) you will need to enable legacy logging in Moodle administration to get dedication time. If you restore a course from an older version in a newer version, you won't have any problem.
If you need to update fast to a new Moodle 3.x version, you should try to setup the plugin manually in your Moodle site. This is an easy process. Just download the 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.
Support
Support is offered in English and Spanish in these forum discussions:
- English discussion: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=109487
- Spanish discussion: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=109489
Code repository: https://bitbucket.org/ciceidev/moodle_block_dedication
Issues: https://bitbucket.org/ciceidev/moodle_block_dedication/issues
Credits
This block was developed and produced by CICEI at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University.
First version for Moodle 1.9 by Borja Rubio Reyes.
Updated and improved version for Moodle 2.x and 3.x by Aday Talavera Hierro.
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
# Participants: 65
But the "Dedication Block" only shows 32 (????)
All the 32 participants that are showing in the Dedication Block belong to a group!!!
Tested with another course with 200 Participants and the Dedication Block shows all of them (no groups)
It seems to me that this block does not work correctly when there are groups in the course.
I just checked it out!
Was wondering if you plan on seeing if the plugin will work with Moodle 3.10? My courses start in June and would like to use the latest version for security proposes. Thanks.
If Andy's not available, has anyone tested it on the 3.10 release?
Ta.
@Andres Sch, could you tell me what theme are you using so I can try to debug the css issue?
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.