M28 - Moodle Reports

Keywords: reports, activity, data, usage, use, access, popular items, analytics

What is it?

Moodle Reports allow tutors and course administrators to look at course logs and user activity reports. The three reports that are most useful are Live Logs, Activity Reports and Course participation.

Why use it?

You can use these to inform course evaluations; to ascertain what components of the course were viewed by students and how many times they were accessed; and look at individual participant logs to check their activity within Moodle.

Who can use it?

Tutors and course administrators can view course logs and user activity reports.

Students can not see these reports.

Before I start...

However you decide to use your Reports, it's important to be completely transparent with students and colleagues. Jisc's work on ethics has fed into a code of practice.

How do I use them?

To view any Reports for your Moodle space

Once in your Moodle course, look in the Settings block and, under Course administration, expand Reports.

Logs - for a particular person or resource

Clicking the Logs link takes you to this page:

The reports on this page will allow you to filter course actions up until a year ago by user, date, resource/activity and action.
You can use this tool to see what a particular student (or member of staff) has been doing and when they last accessed the course, or a particular resource or activity.
For example, to see the last access for a particular participant, select their name from the 2^nd drop-down menu that says All Participants.
In the 3^rd drop-down menu, where it says Today and the date, choose All days.
To see the last time the student accessed the course, leave the remaining filters as they are and click Get these logs.
A list of all the actions the student has undertaken within this resource/activity in the past year will be displayed. These actions can be filtered using the 5^th drop-down menu, where it says All actions.
The last time the student accessed this activity will be displayed at the top of the list.
By default, the information appears on the webpage, but you can also choose to download the filtered logs as a tab-delimited text file, excel file or ODS file (the ODS extension is for open source spreadsheet files like in Open Office).
To download the Logs, on the results page scroll to the bottom and choose the type of file you would like to download from the drop-down menu underneath 'Download table data as' and click Download. The default option (Comma separated values text file) is a good choice, as this can be opened in Excel or other spreadsheet software.

Live logs

The Live logs from the past hour shows activity on your Moodle course within the past hour within a pop-up window. This page automatically updates every minute.

Activity report - views per resource or activity

The Activity report can answer some general and specific questions at a glance, such as:

Are they looking at the module Handbook?
Did the message I sent out to look at the assessment criteria early have the desired effect?
Which materials are most or least used?
Which materials get the most repeat visits?

The report shows all activity in the course on a single page, sorted by topic/week number. The start date for this report will be the start date in that Moodle space's Settings. Each item in the report displays with the number of times it has been viewed, by how many people, the date and time it was last accessed, and the number of days and hours since last access in brackets.

Course participation - who has completed a particular resource/activity

The Course participation report will show all actions for particular activities and resources on your course. A useful feature of the Course participation is the option to send a message to all students who have not completed a certain action. Other options with selected users are to add a note or extend enrolment.

You can filter by role, so you can see just what tutors, course administrators or students collectively have been doing.
You can use the Course participation to send reminders to students to complete online activities
To send a reminder to students, select an activity ( I have chosen quiz in this case ) and any other filters you wish to use and press Go.

You can filter the results by group if you have groups set up.
To send a message to these users, select the users you want and then where it says With selected users... choose Send a message and click OK. You may now send them a message via Moodle, for more information see Moodle Messaging miniguide.