TimeSpent

Reporting on Study time

A frequent question on the Moodle forums is a report showing "how long" people spend on courses. If you want this because someone else has asked you to provide it, take a look at this plugin and the description of what it does.

https://moodle.org/plugins/block_dedication

If you want this information for your own benefit you might want to think about why you want the information. A plugin like block_dedication attempts to make a guess at at the amount of time spent on a course but in reality it is providing statistics relating to what has been clicked on. It is perfectly possible for students to click fairly at random, and to take long breaks staring out of the window or scrolling amusing videos on their mobile device. That is not to say that it isn't useful, it is just that like all statistics, it needs interpreting to be useful.

This raises the question why do you want to know how much time is spent on the course. It might be a more useful question to ask how much time on average elapses between someone starting the course and getting an acceptable grade. This could be useful to estimate how long the course will probably take.

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=364261

Consider the following scenario.

Two students go into your LMS to read an assignment. Each clicks on the "assignment" web page. A clicks take .01 seconds. Is this what you want to tally? Do you conclude that a student spend .01 seconds in the course?

Then, student1 takes 1 minute to read the assignment, whereas student2 takes 5 minutes to read the assignment. What do you want to tally? And what are you really trying to conclude... that student2 is the better student because they spent more "time" in your course? Or is student1 the better student because they can read faster? This is one example why "time" is not an appropriate measure, and why it is often recommended that one needs to use an "assessment" to gage "learning."

One problem trying to measure "study time" is that there is no way to know when the student is "thinking" about the course topics. Might you put a sensor on the student's head to measure "brain activity?" And how would you know that the student is thinking about the course topic or assignment?