Moodle Activity Viewer is an open-source Greasemonkey user script and web-service counterpart that visualises student activity within the Moodle LMS. It does this not with tables or graphs, but instead using a heat map - colouring links lighter or darker according to how often they are accessed as illustrated below.
The heat map can represent a range of usage information including
- Total number of students to have clicked on a link
- Number of clicks on a link
- Identify students who have and haven't clicked on a link
These representations can be shown for all students, selected Moodle groups of students, and individual students.
This enterprise version of MAV requires a webserver (for example Apache) to install and run the web-service component that aggregates student activity from the Moodle Database.
Furthermore, MAV works only with the Firefox web browser at this time, although a Google Chrome version is planned.
The following is required to make use of MAV Enterprise Edition:
- Firefox 15+
- Greasemonkey Firefox Addon
- A webserver (e.g. Apache) to install the web-service component of MAV
- PHP 5.4+
- Moodle 2.2+ Source Code
- Access to the Moodle DB (or a copy) by the MAV web-service The web service has to query a database to get the usage information. It's currently written to use an aggregated table calculated from the Moodle database.
- A little patience, as this is still emerging and experimental software
MAV Enterprise Edition was written for use at CQUniversity Australia. Installing MAV Enterprise Edition for users at your institution will require a little effort and patience on your part. Feedback or Pull Requests on improving installation scripts and guides are most welcome.
An Installation Guide is available to step you through the process. If you require assistance, contact the creator, Damien Clark.
- Generate heatmaps according to the number of clicks on each link, or the number of individual students who clicked each link
- The heatmaps can be shown on any Moodle page (such as Course Home, Discussion Forums, Moodle Pages, Moodle Books, Blackboard Collaborate Recordings, and so on)
- The results can be filtered by Moodle groups (e.g. show only Distance students)
- When used with CQUniversity's Early Alerts Student Indicators (EASI) System, you can see heatmaps of individual student activity.
- At the click of a button, identify students who have and haven't accessed resources and activities directly within the page
- Using CQUniversity's EASI System, send personalised templated nudge emails to students to encourage re-engagement in their course studies.
A blog post - The Moodle Activity Viewer (MAV) - Heatmaps of Student Activity provides further information about MAV.
MAV is licenced under the terms of the GPLv3.
Contributions are welcome - fork and push away. Contact me (Damien Clark) for further information.