Viewing reports

4. Keeping the reports up to date: Cron job

This is going to be a little bit technical and one to run past your Moodle administrators!

The activity completion and course completion reports rely on Moodle refreshing its data regularly.

Ideally, when a student completes an activity, we want the activity or course completion reports to show this.  

However, Moodle does not capture this kind of data constantly.  It is captured when the 'cron' runs.  Note: this is a very non-technical explanation!!

There are two things to consider when setting how often the 'cron' runs.  

• As Moodle is capturing data, if there is a lot to work on, it could slow down Moodle. 
• However, we want it run regularly to ensure that reports are up to date. 

At South Devon College we run 'cron' every 5 minutes to ensure the reports are up to date.  Also, by doing this regularly, the load on the server is not so heavy as it won't be doing too much (rather than leaving it to once or twice a day when there could be a lot to do and could slow down the system and mean that reports are not up to date).

It is worth knowing how often your 'cron' runs so that you can be aware with reports.  For example if the cron is due to run every 5 minutes and the next one is at 10.15 and the student completes the activity at 10.14, by the time I view the report it is probably up to date.  However, if the student completes the activity at 10.11, I may need to wait a bit before the report is updated.

You can find out more about 'cron' (and the technical bits!) here: http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Cron