Understanding how a teacher uses the Recent Activity block in a moodle course

A little enlightening.  The Recent Activity block in moodle is popular with a number of our teachers.  They like it because it shows well, recent activity by the students in the course.  Teachers can at a click or two see who has submitted what in the course activities.  This works very well in particular with the moodle big three "forums, assignments, quizzes".

The Recent Activity block in action looks like this:

The Full report of recent activity link is even better - clicking that link provides a *report by topic, its the big three by course page topics.  This report shows the teacher at a glace that from Unit 1 and Unit 2, students have submitted forum posts and an assignment upload.

This is informative because I know teachers are busy and like all the help they can get in terms of notifications of what needs grading/attention, their attention.  In the assessments, we also have the automatic notifications on, a push email to the teacher.  This report is not a push, its a pull, but its a pull with nice and neatly presented recently submitted work.

I did have a teacher that called this the Outline report.  Interesting name, accurate, but made up.  She also said sometimes students do not show on the report.  She is pretty experienced with the moodle, so i wonder if the report is a little buggy.  Perhaps I should ask her for an example of work submitted by a student that is not appearing.  It could be a filter that she has set on the report or maybe even cron not running yet.

the end.