Reports in Moodle are very powerful and will tell you what your students have been doing in a module and when. You can use reports to provide you with information on how students are interacting with content and activities on your module. Reports can help in re-desiging your module for the new year and term. You can identify which content might need improved signposting to encourage students to engage with it. You can also make a decision to remove content that has been under-utilised by students or consider presenting it in a more meaningful way. Moodle reports provide

a log of activity in your module.
a course activity report, showing the number of views for each activity and resource.
a participation report for a particular activity.
graphs and tables of user activity.

IP addresses are presented in some of the reports. We do not collect IP addresses for the purposes of tracking students. These are used for trouble-shooting domain/geography-related access issues.

Moodle have produced a really helpful screencast on using logs in Moodle to support student engagement.

Please note, that on some of the reports you can select to send users a message. Staff and students can change their notifications preferences on Moodle, so we cannot guarantee that message notifications will be directed to students' email addresses.

Please note, that reports will not be generated for assignments with blind marking enabled.

Using reports

When to use

Reports tell you what your students have been doing in your Moodle module. You generate reports when you need to know which pages students are accessing, the times at which they access and the activities they perform within modules. You can also use Moodle to help you investigate issues. For example, if a student is marked as late in submitting an online assignment, you can review the Logs to investigate when the student accessed the module and the assignment activity.

The benefits of using reports

When you know what your students have been doing in your Moodle module, you can adjust the module to suit their viewing habits. You can also alert students (or make navigation clearer) to module material they're neglecting, to make sure that they take full advantage of all the online resources you're providing.

How to generate reports from Moodle

Click on Settings>Reports to view the different reports available.

Click on the type of report you require. In the next section we present the types of reports available.

Types of reports

Report	Report contents	Further info or action
Logs	Logs allows you to pull specific activity reports from your module. You can filter the report by: individual users i.e. students, a specific day all days (all activity since the module started), resource or activity, and action i.e. update or view. You can decide to view all the information on a page within Moodle or download it as a CSV or Excel file.	After clicking on the Log option click on the drop- down menus to filter as required. Under All participants, click to select a specific student if required. Under All days, you can see all activity since the module started) or a specific day. Under All activities, click to select a specify activity (these are arranged by topic). Under All Actions you can view everything users have done or search for a specific action such as view. Under All events, you have three options: Teaching which will generally return actions that lecturers have undertaken that affect the student learning on the module such as grading an assignment or adding a new file. Participating generally returns actions that relate to the students' learning on a module such as posting to a Forum. Other relates to events carried out by users other than lecturers and students Click Get these logs. A page will then display with all the relevant data. You may need to scroll to the bottom of the page to move between pages if required. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Select a file type from the Download table data drop-down menu and click Download.
Live logs	Shows all activity within the module for the past hour. This can be useful if you are planning on making a change to an activity as you can check if it will impact on any users who are on the module and interacting with the activity.
Activity report	Shows views for individual resources in the module, and when they were last accessed, sorted by topic. Individual activity reports If activity reports are enabled for a course in the course settings, each course participant can access reports of their contributions, such as forum posts or assignment submissions, logs and a statistics report.	Click each topic to view the relevant activity.
Course participation	Allows you to run a report on participation in a module with the ability to: search back by days, week or months, filter by role i.e. student and filter by type of participation i.e. view or post. It then gives you information on whether users in the user group you have selected have undertaken the activity. You can choose to send a message to those people. For example, you might want to encourage students who have not posted to a forum to make some contribution.	Check the box adjacent to the relevant user under the select column to only select those you wish to contact or click select all from the bottom of the page to choose all of those on the list. At the bottom of the page from the With selected users drop-down menu, select Send a message, click Ok. Write your message and click Send.
Activity completion	Completion of all activities for all users in the course. Please see Activity completion guidance.	Filter by first name or surname, or download the data in 2 different formats.
Statistics	You select a Course, a Report type and a Time period. The statistics are presented in a graph and a table	The statistics graphs and tables show how many hits there have been on various parts of your site during various time frames. They do not show how many distinct users there have been.
Last access to course	To get an overview of data about when a student/s last accessed a module/s. You might then want to contact students who have never access the module a few weeks into start of term.	Click on Settings>Enrolled Users. Select Students from the filter drop-down menu. Click on Last access to course to sort by when students last accessed the module. Check the Select box alongside the students you want to contact. From the With selected users drop-down menu, select Send a message.

Event monitoring

Key features

Event monitoring allows Programme Administrators and lecturers who are also enrolled with the Pilot role to receive notification when certain events happen in Moodle. You can request access to the Pilot role via the IT Self Service Portal.

To monitor an event, a 'rule' needs to be created for it and then a staff user will need to subscribe to the rule to be notified. The rule will specify what the event is and how often it must happen before a notification is sent to the subscriber. The notification may be pop-up, email or other chosen methods.

A lecturer can create a rule from Settings>Reports>Event monitoring rules
Staff roles can subscribe to available rules from Profile>Preferences>Event monitoring. Staff can set the subscription to individual activities on a module e.g. one forum or all of an activity type e.g. all forums on a module.
You can configure your notifications for event monitoring rules that you are subscribed to from Profile>Preferences>Notifications. Scroll to the end of the page to set the Event monitoring notifications.

How to create or manage a rule

Setting

Meaning

Rule name

You should use a name that other staff on your module will understand as they may wish to subscribe to the rule you created.

Area to monitor

When you select an area to monitor, for example, Forum, the 'Event' drop down menu below will then display the events you can select from.

Event

Once an area has been chosen, the events for that area will display.

Description

You don't have to use a description but if you do, it should be something meaningful to other staff enrolled on the module as they may wish to subscribe to the rule you created.

Notification threshold

This means: how many times should this event happen before subscribers get notified?

Notification message

When creating or editing a rule, you can embed placeholders to add details to notification messages. The use of placeholders is optional; you can use any personalised message, but if you wish to use placeholders, there are examples provided below:

The placeholders that can be used in a message template are as follows:

Placeholder	What it does	Example
{link}	Direct link to the actual event	a forum discussion
{modulelink}	Link to the module where the event has happened	a forum
{rulename}	A name for the rule.	Student discussions
{description}	A description of the rule.	I want to receive notifications when there is a large volume of student posts in a discussion.
{eventname}	The name of the event being monitored.	Forum post created.

Example:

The above example shows the placeholders for a rule to monitor the Forum post created event. The notification message using these placeholders would be as follows:

The rule {rulename}, monitoring the event {eventname}, has just been fulfilled.

Click the following link to go to the forum discussion: {link}

Rule description: {description}

The result would display like this:

The rule Student discussions, monitoring the event Forum post created, has just been fulfilled.

Click on the following link to go to the forum discussion: http://YourMoodle.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2 .

Rule description: I want to receive notifications when there are a large volume of student posts in a discussion.

How to subscribe to a rule

When events are created, there is a link to the Event monitoring page which is in My profile settings
From here, you can unsubscribe to any events you are subscribed to already and you can subscribe to new events created by you or others.

The screencast below provides an overview of Event Monitoring.