Title: 7.2 Managing your students
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Moodle logs

We've already seen how you may need to manage your students use for forum and chat sessions, but what if you want to get an idea of whether students are using the activities and resources you have spent time creating.

Moodle records every page that each user visits and all the actions they perform and makes all this data available to teachers using the 'reports' section of the course administration block.

From this page, there are a variety of reports you can choose to look at:

Logs: view all the activity (page views) for a particular day, you can also limit this by the activity or even down to individual users. You also have the option to export this data to Excel or other formats.

Live logs: this will show the usage of your course in the last hour

Activity Report: view how often the activities you have created are used

Participation Report: similar to the course logs, you can view usage for specific activities, grouped by course participants.

Statistics: this shows a graph of you course usage. This facility needs to be enabled by your Moodle system administrator.

Using these reports mean you can get a good idea of which activities are being used and also spot if there are users who perhaps aren't participating as much as they could be. Remember that the course logs only give an indication of usage, they can't tell you whether a student has actually read and understood a particular resource or gained knowledge from participating in an activity.

If you identify users who aren't using the content and activities, then it's worth trying to find out the reasons behind this. Do they lack confidence in using computers? Do they have problems gaining access to a networked computer? Or are there other reasons?

Introduction to the Gradebook

What if you have multiple assignments and quizzes and you want to see an overall summary of your whole class?

Fortunately, Moodle has the 'gradebook' functionality for this. In your course administration block, click on the 'grades' link, you'll see a summary of all your students, plus all the assignments and quizzes in your course. For example:

This very simple gradebook example shows us the geography quiz and the project proposal assignment in my course, plus the overall mark Peter has for the course so far. In your course the gradebook will show all course participants, all the graded activities plus the marks you've given.

The gradebook is a great way to get a quick overview of your students grades. Using the links in the drop down list at the top of the grader report, you can export all this information in a variety of formats.

This has been a very short introduction to using the gradebook. Have a look at Chapter 13 in the Using Moodle book for a much more in depth look at grading and how you can create your own grading scales.