Moodle is a really useful tool for helping teachers to monitor the progress of their students. As any teacher knows, this can be a challenge, so having everything in one place is very useful. We’ll look at how you can monitor progress with an example.
Checking usage and completion of tasks
For you to be able to help your users learn, it goes without saying that they have to complete the tasks you set! Quite a common question is “how do I know if my users are looking at the content I make for them?” There are a variety of ways to monitor this, which vary depending on whether you are looking at a resource or an activity.
Tracking usage of course materials
Quite often you might set your students a task to go on to your Moodle course and read a resource that you have uploaded or follow a link to another website. While you can’t know for sure that they have read the material, it is possible to check that they have displayed it on their screen.
To check if users had viewed a resource, we have completion tracking. To use this feature, your administrator must enable it for your whole site and you need to turn it on in the student progress section of the course settings.
This means that now you can easily see a list of users who have looked at the resource.
On the pupil view, there are boxes next to items that require completion. If a teacher has specified certain conditions that need to be met, the box will automatically fill with a tick once they have been met. Users can also use this to manually track their progress towards completion if there are no criteria set for a particular task by ticking a shaded box themselves. This is shown in the following screenshot:
Preparation for course completion reports
The course completion report will show you which activities or resources your learners have used. To demonstrate this first you need to change some of the settings on your resources and activities, and ask your administrator to enable it in the site settings.
Completion settings for resources
Let’s go back to a resource we uploaded in the first topic “Manufacture of magnesium sulfate” and edit it. Click on Turn editing on, which has the icon of the hand holding the pen. When the updating file dialog comes up, scroll right down to the bottom where it says Activity completion. Here you have a number of settings, as shown in the next screenshot:
We’re going to use the setting Show activity as complete when conditions are met. If you’re happy letting your users decide to declare when they have completed an activity, you can use the setting Students can manually mark the activity as completed. This would be useful for a self review, towards pupils building a portfolio, or just to get them to take more responsibility over their learning. Once you’ve done this choose the conditions that need to be met. As this is a resource check the box next to Require view. These conditions vary depending on the nature of the activity. If you want to you can set a date when you expect the activity to be completed. This is just to help organize your completion report and is not shared with the users.
Completion settings for activities
Different activities have their own settings that you can set to decide when an activity is completed by your users. We’ll go through each of these below.
Forum activity completion settings
You can set up activity completion for forums. In the introduction to this forum, our learners were asked to answer the most recent unanswered question and then post a question of their own. Let’s use activity completion to make sure that they do this. In the same way, go to update the forum and scroll down to the activity completion settings at the bottom.
You’ll notice that there are a lot more options than for a resource. The activity completion settings that we’ll choose are Required discussions and Require replies. Both of these will be set to one. This means that your students will need to start at least one discussion and provide at least one reply. Don’t forget to set the completion tracking setting in the top drop-down box. This is what the settings will look like:
Quiz activity completion
For quizzes (assignments and lessons), there are two options for activity completion. You can either require your users to view the quiz or require a grade. Let’s go back to the motion quiz we set up and let that require students to receive a grade to complete this activity. Here are the settings:
Chat activity completion
For a chat activity, the only completion option is for users to manually check the boxes completed.
Once you’ve gone through and set the activity completion settings you will be able to see which of your activities your users have completed.
Completion tracking for your whole course
Now that you have set up your activities and resources to be tracked, you need to define at a course level, which activities need to be finished for course completion.
From the settings block on the left-hand side, click on the link Completion tracking.
This is where you decide on the criteria for course completion. We want our users to complete all of the activities chosen, so in the first box choose All for the aggregation method. If there are prerequisites for your course, you can set them here. In the activities completed box, check all of the activities you want your users to complete and specify the completion dates, if any, and passing grades. All the settings can be changed to a later date, if you wish.
Course completion reports
You can now set up the course completion reports. The link can be found in the navigation block on the left-hand side:
Once you click on the course completion reports link, you should see something like the following:
The grayed out boxes with ticks are for activities that users can manually choose completion for. So as you can see, it would be quite easy to identify which users haven’t completed particular tasks. From here, you can click a user’s name and send them a reminder via a message. You can also export this data if you wish.
Course reports
There are three different types of course reports—activity report, view course logs, and participation report. You can use them to monitor your users in slightly different ways.
Activity report
For the activity report, you can see a simple overview of the number of views for each activity. This could be useful if you want to see if one activity is more popular than another or if an activity is not being viewed a lot.
View course logs
This report shows detailed usage across the whole course. Now that we are using completion reports, you would only need to use this type of log if you wanted to check when a particular user accessed a task.
Participation report
This report gives you a customizable overview for each activity listed by a user. You could use this type of report to see if the users have viewed or posted to an activity or resource and then send messages directly to multiple users.
