Teacher reporting tools for student progress and activity

Well, this post is a bit more reflective than usual.  Its not a problem or technical issue per say, but an observation after 30 days of this semester.

We have some teachers who are part time, which translates to they do not have enough time or get paid enough to have to "hunt" for student information in their courses.  What they are saying is how difficult it is in the new moodle 2.3.1 to find information on what students have done since the last time they, the teacher, were logged in.  One of the teachers, who has used BB said that when they would log into BB, it would tell them what they needed to grade.  I can see how that would be a nice feature.  Reduces the amount of work necessary to determine what they need to look at.  When the teacher logs in, they want to see quickly and easily what needs their attention!  They do not want to have to "hunt" for activity.

Moodle does have native activity reporting, but it is not a push solution like they want.  They have to pull it, which means they have to work a little more to find what my students have been doing and what needs my attention.

My colleague and I put together a cheat sheet to help our instructors to use the tools available.  Topics in the cheat sheet include:

Native moodle course reports

 In each course, the teacher has options in their course settings block for reporting activity. We highlighted the logs, live logs, activity report and completion report (made avail. because we are using completion tracking)

Recent activity block - a plugin that we activated

We have activated the recent course activity block for some of the courses.  We actually told the teachers how to turn this on if they wanted to use it.  We did not force them to use it.  If the teacher says "i'm having to work to hard to figure out what is happening in my course.

Activity Completion tracking

In each course, we activated the completion tracking with the option to automatically update when the activity is viewed by the student.  This includes all content, assignments, quizzes etc. This feature also creates a new report option for the teacher in the Course Reports area. The completion tracking is mainly a tool for students to keep track of where they have been in their course

Checklist module

The checklist module is for both the student and the teacher.  The checklist module allows the teacher to highlight important criteria, assignments in a course.  The teacher creates it and a *copy of it is pushed out to each enrolled student in the course.  Each student then updates their own copy of the checklist.  A special teacher only block shows each of the enrolled students checklist with their completion.  This is not a perfect scenario, but it does give the teacher, at a glance, a progress report of where the students are completing important course milestones that the teacher has set up.