My morning of solving three tricky-ish moodle issues

I have three requests in my inbox this am.  Each one from a different user of our moodle system.  Two were teachers and one was an administrator.  After a bit of analysis and thought, came to three successful conclusions.

1 - from a teacher

Hi - I just got this from G P.
Ms. Cook  things were going fine but when I click back on to do another assignment today, the assignment page was not there so I don't have the instructions again for 1.07.  Can you please help with this.    Thanks, G

GP is a student in a course.  turns out the course is missing directional content.  After looking critically at the content, could see that what had been termed as "Analysis Questions, or Assignment instruction area or Directions block", was missing from this lesson.  This was not something that I could really solve.  I invited the vendor Florida virtual, into the course to see where it could update that little piece of content.  The content is delivered via LTI service, meaning not local.  Nothing I could change.  Could only notify FV about it and hope that they can add a different content piece.  In the meantime, I asked the teacher if they wanted to create questions for the lesson or if we wanted to simply remove the requirement for the student to do any response.  We could simply remove the content link the assignment link and the quiz from the course.

2 - from a teacher

From: Ann S
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 5:45 AM
To: M, Mike
Subject: Bradley W. Am Hist A

I got Bradley W's DBQ essay.  He received 42/50 points.  I cannot see how I input this into his grade book.    Ann

When I went to the course in question, I did see where Ann had attempted to add something to the gradebook for this, but not sure what it was, a label maybe.  I ended up deleting it, and adding an assignment activity to the course home page.  I also updated the value/points avail.  for it and moved it into the correct location in the Full gradebook view.  I even added the grade for the student to the gradebook.

 

I did notice after adding the grade that I had one more little change to make in the gradebook.  That was adding a checkmark to each of the three checkboxes in the image below.  Without it, the grade calculation was including the test not yet taken.

3 - Question from a moodle on-line courses administrator

Hi, James.

Is there a way that Moodle can summarize the time a student spent in a course?  I’m sure I asked before, but forgot. 

For example, if we wanted to determine how much time Jeff L spent overall in Astronomy (Hoobler) since 9/1, is that something easy to do?

Just wondering, in case we want to look at the eDynamic courses to see if some of them might be too easy.

Thanks. 

 Well - this solution would not be easy, or answer if I had not created a solution for this a couple years ago.  I created a script that looked at the moodle logs for each student in each course.  It estimates or accumulates their session times.  It counts the time between the first and last login each day for the student in the course.  with a stipulation that if there was over 60 minutes of innactivity in the session (no records), then I would cap the session length at 1 hr.  This prevented ballooned times for students in the course.  I reminded my customer about this report and actually gave him a screen grab of their progress report.

All in all a productive am or moodle problem solving.

The end.