Technologies to support monitoring

In the online and blended environment, there are many different functions with the Learning Management System (Moodle) that you can use to monitor engagement of students’ progress. Listed below are the most commonly used functions to monitor efficiency and student engagement online:

  • Progress Bar – Allows teaching staff to create a visual to-do list of items related to students’ progress through the whole, or discrete parts of a course.  The visual nature of the progress bar assists students with their time management and provides a clear road-map to the most important and time critical parts of the course.
  • Logs – Provides a listing of selected activities by selected users within items for a selected period, in a selected format. For example, you can upload an article that students need to read before the next class and run an ‘activity log’ to get a listing of the students who viewed the article to determine which students are more likely to be prepared for class.
  • Activity Report – Shows the number of views for each activity and resource. By having a list of the number of views each activity has had it can be noted quickly what activities haven't had any views by the students and which activities have had a high volume of views. Knowing what activities have been viewed and how many times they have been viewed is a benefit as it can create a pattern of what types of activities and resources students are viewing and those that they aren't.
  • Participation Report – Selected actions by selected users for a selected period in relation to a selected activity.  The participation report is similar to the other reports in that they display a listing of who has viewed what items and when they have viewed it but the main difference is that the teacher can send all or selected users a message. For example, you might want to encourage users who have not posted to a forum to make some contribution.
  • Activity completion – Shows if an activity has been completed or not. It can show the progress a student is making towards finishing the course according to specific criteria.  The settings allow you to control and monitor your students' progress through a sequence of learning materials presented. The Activity Completion Report displays at a glance the progress of all students enrolled in the course against each of the learning tasks identified as needing completion.
  • Gradebook – The gradebook collects items that have been graded from the various parts of Moodle that are assessed, and allows you to view, as well as sort them out into categories and calculate totals in various ways. When you add an assessed item in a Moodle course, the gradebook automatically creates space for the grades it will produce and also adds the grades themselves as they are generated, either by the system or by you. Using Gradebook as part of learning and teaching is a useful tool for gathering all grades in a quick and convenient location which benefits the ease of providing feedback to students on their performance and where improvement could be beneficial.

Resources, strategies or assistance

Websites

Strategies

  • Contact your Director, Learning and Teaching or Institute Learning Designer to organise a group workshop for your teaching peers to upskill with the use of Moodle Reporting functions.

Assistance

  • Contact your Institute's Learning Designer to discuss the best Moodle reporting function to support your monitoring needs.