Moodle report for helping teachers to clean and manage courses and contents
Course Manager report is intended for teachers as a tool for managing their courses. Based on native functions as well as other functions specifically developed for this report, its main goal is to raise awarness among teachers of what they store in their courses, if their courses are alive or not… and encourage them to clean Moodle by :
• opening functions which don’t go against system permissions (such a trash category) ; • giving shortcuts function to clean course (reports, bulk uneroll cohorts, simple reinit) ; • offering visualization tools to encourage to clean courses.
Every night, an automatic task will calculate a serial of reports concerning courses storings and courses log actvity. Those reports are shown to teachers in a dashboard, and can be added in each course if chosen.
There are 6 reports : • Heavy courses : fix a limit for what will be considered as heavy (in Mo) • Empty courses : courses with only native forum • No students : courses wihtout any students enrolled • No visits : courses with no visits by students, but by teachers too ! • Orphan submissions : warns teachers if some assigns contain submissions from unenrolled students.
The total weight of course files will also be calculated.
Teachers can become acquainted with these reports : • By seeing them in the Course manager Teacher Dashboard ; • By seeing them directly in courses (if enabled by admin) ; • By receiving every month a mailing recapitulating courses concerned by reports (if enabled by admin).
This tool offers a view of every course a teacher is enrolled in. Each course display informations (visible course, files weight, number of studens and teachers enrolled…), reports list, and offers tool such as shortcuts for : • Moving a course in a trash category ; • Seeing files weight in course and most heavy activities ; • Resetting course with a simplified tool ; • Unenrolling cohorts.
The dashboard can easily be filtered for each reports, and a search tool can help to find courses.
The plugin is completed with special tools for admins in Site admin > Report section :
• Filearea report : calculates files weight according to their file area, that can help to detect problems. • Orphan submissions : this report offers possibility to clean assigns from submissions uploaded by enrolled students in a course which is not reinitialized. Those files can represent a very heavy weight ! • Courses without teachers : this report lists all courses without teachers, and offers a tool to move them in trash category. • Stats pages : this page will display statistics about your Moodle instance, based on reports calculted by this plugin.
If you want to give access to dashboard, you must add in navigation, in a block or any other way a direct link to this tool : /report/coursemanager/view.php file. This plugin doesn’t add automatically a link in dashboard or course admin navigation ! Suggestion : simply use the custom menu items setting in Admin > Appearance > Theme settings to add an element in main navigation.
Reports displayed in course can be added in two ways :
- By displaying a serial of icons next to course title ;
- By adding a collapsed button right under course navigation.
Those two ways has been tested with several Moodle templates such as Almond, Boost, Boost Union, Classic, Moove and Trema. Other templates has been tested too, with several behaviors : • Themes Academi, Degrade, Eguru and Klass : the icon display mode works, showing a small gap for icons • Theme Adaptable : icon display mode doesn’t work, because targetted zone doesn’t exist in this template.
This plugin offers possibility to set every threshold that will trigger a report : • Limit weight for a file or course ; • Roles concerned (teacher and student) • Number of days without visit for teachers and students
You can also set settings for :
- Defining trash category ;
- Activating or not reports mailing ;
- Modifying mail content ;
- Selecting the way reports are displayed in courses (next to course title, under course title or none).
All comments are welcome to help improve this plugin. Please use GitHub issues for improvements, bug or others ideas.
- Install plugin in report directory (see below for more information)
- Create a category called "Trash" or another name : this category will be used to move and store all courses that teachers want to delete.
- Defined all settings in plugin settings page. You must define thresholds for course weight, file weight, number of days without visits for teacher and for students. Without these, Course Manager won't be able to calculate reports.
- Add a link to teacher dashboard (see "How to give access to teacher dashbord ?" section above)
- If you can, manually run the scheduled task "Reports calculation for Course Manager" (\report_coursemanager\task\run_reports_task) in admin to generate course reports. If you can't, task is automatically trigerred during the night. Then, reports can be displayed in teacher dashboard and/or directly in courses if enabled.
Log in to your Moodle site as an admin and go to Site administration > Plugins > Install plugins. Upload the ZIP file with the plugin code. You should only be prompted to add extra details if your plugin type is not automatically detected. Check the plugin validation report and finish the installation.
The plugin can be also installed by putting the contents of this directory to
{your/moodle/dirroot}/report/coursemanager
Afterwards, log in to your Moodle site as an admin and go to Site administration > Notifications to complete the installation.
Alternatively, you can run
php admin/cli/upgrade.php
to complete the installation from the command line.
2022 Olivier VALENTIN
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.