Moodle Learner Profiles
- Matthew Harrington
Lessons Learned from Moodle
Having an in-course and an out-of-course profile view makes it much easier to figure out what data is relevant.
Heavy customisation for administrators the way Moodle allows is vital for tailoring profile pages to the institution’s use case. There is no one-stop solution here, every organisation is going to have their own bespoke needs, and any user profiles we offer are going to need to prioritise flexibility above all else.
That being said, the actual process of enabling and disabling profile blocks is actually insane. There is no reason it needs to be this in-depth when it comes to simply enabling or disabling certain fields and blocks on profiles for different user access roles. This is somewhere we can win.
There’s actually a lot of useful reporting functionality accessible from Moodle profiles, not just from the staff perspective (though being able to review a learner’s grading, discussion contributions etc. from their profile is great), but also from a learner perspective. They can access reporting on all their own contributions, and that can be used really effectively to help learners oversee their own learning.
Learner Profile Data
Moodle learners can enter the following information into their profiles on the Moodle Sandbox site:
First Name (required)
Last Name (required)
Email Address (required)
Email Visibility
Hidden
This hides the email address from all learners, but not staff.
Visible to Course Participants
This hides the email address from all learners who do not share a course enrollment.
Visible to Everyone
MoodleNet Profile ID
MoodleNet is Moodle’s OER platform
City/Town
Country
Timezone
Preferred Theme
Users can choose to modify their site layout between installed themes
Description
A personal bio
User picture
Includes a field for alternative/descriptive text
Additional names
First name - Phonetic
Last name - Phonetic
Middle name
Alternative name
Interests
Allows learners to enter tags
Optional
ID Number
Institution
Department
Phone
Mobile Phone
Address
Administrators can fully customise which fields appear on user profiles, including the addition of custom fields, so it’s likely that this may include some fields that have been included on the sandbox site for demonstration purposes, as I’m not able to find a better source for which fields are enabled by default. That being said, it’s likely that the profile data is close to default as there’s not much reason to customise the sandbox, which is reset hourly.
Learner Profile Page(s)
Moodle has two primary profile pages - a site (full) profile, and a course profile.
Full Profile
Moodle full profile page displays the following tools, data, and sections to the user when they view their own site profile:
Message - A quick button to message the learner through Moodle’s chat system
Description - Appears at the top of the page, above the rest of the details.
User Details
Email address (as well as whether it is hidden from other users or not)
MoodleNet Profile ID
Country
City/Town
Time Zone
Interests
Clicking a tag shows all learners who have that tag as an interest
Reports
Browser Sessions - A report showing when and where their account was accessed
Grades Overview - A report showing all enrolled courses and their current grades
Privacy and Policies
A link to the site’s data retention policy
Login Activity
First Login Date
Last Login Date (Which is always the current login when viewing your own profile)
Course Details
A list of enrolled courses with links to their course profile for each course
Mobile App
A QR code that is generated every 15 minutes to allow the profile to be linked to the Moodle mobile app if enabled.
Miscellaneous
Blog Entries
A list of all blog entries made by the learner (and the option to create a new blog post)
Forum Entries
A list of all forum activity, including comments within posts
Forum Discussions
A list of all forum posts originally started by the learner
Learning Plans
A list of all learning plans tied to competencies. This is part of Moodle’s competency-based education system. Learners can view these, as well as uploading evidence of prior learning for instructors to review and tie to their created learning plans.
Unfortunately, I am not able to see which of these details are available to other learners, as there is only one user account available on the Moodle sandbox site.
Permission can be given to users to modify the blocks available on their own user profile pages, and any user profile data can be included in user profile pages as configured by site administrators. So the appearance, layout, contents, and fields available on Moodle profile pages are fully customisable.
Course Profile
The course profile is similar to the full profile, with the following changes:
All report links are contextualised to the currently selected course, for example instead of providing an overall grade report, it provides a link to the grade report for the current course, and the link to all forum posts shows all forum posts in the current course, rather than all posts across the entire site.
The Login Activity box instead displays the last time the user was active in the course, rather than their overall login activity.
The Course Details box is contextualised to the current course, and displays the user’s role for the current course.
