Moodle - Learner Progress Tracking
- Matthew Harrington
Moodle’s administrative reports are covered in more depth in Platform-level analytics and reporting research and Course-level analytics and reporting research [competitive analysis]. I won’t reproduce that entirely here, but here’s the summarised version with some additions.
Summary & Lessons Learned from Moodle
Moodle doesn’t provide enough tools for administrators and program managers out of the box. Pretty much all their reporting tools at this level assume either the resources to build custom reporting and dashboard based on queries, or integration with a third-party service or plugin.
As usual, Moodle’s implementation of different models is fragmented and inconsistent. As an open source platform, this can happen all too easily, and it’s something we need to be keenly aware of. Moodle cannot be faulted for its comprehensive support of different patterns of progress tracking, but none of them really seem to work consistently together in any sort of unified system.
Moodle’s completion system addresses something that is very wrong with completion in Open edX - we have no way to support manual completion, no way for staff to mark things complete for learners, no custom completion conditions, and no concept of course completion besides certificates. Expect a soapbox on this in the Open edX section.
Supporting different completion models such as competencies is nice for academia, but even their documentation on the subject requires an in-depth understanding of CBE that non-academic course authors (and even a lot of academics, in my experience at least) will lack. Even putting aside the typically Moodle dodgy UX of the implementation of the feature, with different settings and features related to CBE living in wildly different places, I don’t think the core of our platform should actually include anything that strictly requires a high level of external knowledge to operate. It should be intuitive and opinionated so that there’s no choice but to adapt and use it, rather than existing as a feature in core that the majority will never enable.
Moodle’s learner progress features for activity completion are pretty good in that it makes it clear to learners what content isn’t complete and most importantly why it’s not currently marked as complete. This kind of clarity helps to make the steps to achieve progress clear to learners, and is worth replicating.
In general Moodle provides a lot of answers to the question why for learners, which is important. Why is my grade this many points? Why did I only get 5 points for this activity with 10 points available? The more clarity provided the better (although Moodle once again falls down in terms of making it easy to access that Why, in a quiz it takes about 4 clicks to get to results, which is not OK, and you can’t access your grade page from anywhere but the outline, which is hard to get back to).
Administrator Learner Progress Tracking
Moodle offers reporting and event logs that can be filtered down to the per learner level, providing a record of all activities performed by a specific learner or cohort of learners. Their report builder allows accessing data tables to provide custom reports of data from specific tables. The administrative reports are not fantastic for providing administrators with an overview of course reporting, and third-party plugins such as this Course Completion Overview plugin shows that it’s a need that is not well-addressed in Moodle (the comments are all generally along the lines of “Will this be updated soon, because I don’t have any other way to do this and this plugin hasn’t been updated in years”).
Even simply tracking the number of learners who have completed a course (not even progress within the course) is a surprisingly terrible process which requires using a custom report at best, and custom reports are extremely limited in scope (they essentially provide an interface for querying a single SQL table, and not much else with regards to providing pre-packaged data or cross-table data). Most of Moodle’s data needs are served by third-party plugins rather than the core platform.
Competencies (more information on these below) provide administrators with an overall view of the performance of courses against competency frameworks established at the platform level:
When enabled, administrators get access to a basic overview report for courses on their site, as well as the performance of different competency frameworks:
As is the norm for Moodle, this reporting functionality is extended by a third-party plugin, Monitoring of Learning Plans, which provides far more data intended for program managers on course performance.
Course Staff Learner Progress Tracking
Tracking learner progress within courses is performed with a few centralised tools specific to each course, which can be enabled or disabled according to how the organisation wants to track their students:
Gradebook
Competencies
Activity Completion
Course Completion
Course reports and analytics also assist with tracking learner progress, and are covered more specifically in the Reporting and Analytics research doc.
Gradebook
The Moodle Gradebook (also known as the grader report) is the centralised location for tracking learner grading and performance. All graded activities from the course, such as assignments and quizzes, as well as custom grade items created by members of staff are sent to the gradebook.
Full image as that’s hard to read
The gradebook can be searched and filtered by learner, as well as filtered to specific assignments and assignment categories. The only progress tracked within the gradebook is grading - there is no progress tracking for non-graded content that is available from within this view.
Competencies
An optional feature in core Moodle, Competencies track learner progress against core competencies set up by staff, allowing a competency-based education (CBE) approach. The grade of activities as well as manual grading by members of staff all feed back into the associated competency, which can be defined at the course level as well as at the platform level through the competency frameworks mentioned previously.
Staff have access to a few reports related to competencies. The first is the competency breakdown, which allows a staff member to jump to a specific learner and view their progress towards competencies in the course:
By selecting a competency on this report, staff can also set the rating for that learner:
Staff can also review a more general report of competencies in the course:
This shows primarily which competencies learners have achieved the least, allowing course staff to focus their interventions on accomplishing these competencies.
Activity Completion
Activity completion is another optional feature - by default Moodle doesn’t track completion of activities, but the feature can be enabled by administrators. When enabled, instructors can set for each activity how they would like it to be marked as complete, either automatically by a range of criteria specific to each item (for example pages can be automatically marked as complete when viewed, while assignments can require a submission or grade to be marked as complete), or by a manual checkbox provided to the learner that they need to tick to mark the task as being completed. Activity completion can be used to gate access to other content once enabled.
With activity completion set up, staff gain access to the activity completion report, which serves two primary purposes - viewing the completion status for all learners, and manually intervening to mark each task as complete:
Each activity marked for completion appears as a checkbox. By manually checking the box, the activity is marked as complete for that learner. The report can be filtered by categories, and the list of learners can be filtered by name.
Course Completion
Course completion is another optional feature that can be enabled for courses for progress tracking. It allows courses to be marked as complete, either by staff, by the learners themselves, or automatically based on the completion criteria.
The conditions for course completion can be set to require other activities and teacher approval prior to the course being marked as complete for the learner, which can in turn be viewed in a separate instructor report:
Learner Progress Tracking
Learners in Moodle track their progress according to the tools used by the course.
If the gradebook is enabled, then learners can track their own progress through graded activities in much the same way that staff can track them. The gradebook displays all the grades from that learner, this time listed vertically:
The following headings are displayed:
Grade item - the name of the graded activity
Calculated weight - the weight of the item based on all other items (for example if there are 4 graded items in a course, they will all be weighted 25% automatically)
Grade - how the learner scored
Range - the range of possible points available
Percentage - the percentage they scored based on their score out of the maximum
Feedback - a link to feedback on the assignment, if available
Contribution to course total - how much their score contributes to their total. This is similar to weight, except it tracks actual score rather than potential, so in the example above, the learner has achieved a 50% overall grade, with 16.67% coming from their first quiz, and 33.33% coming from their second quiz.
Totals for all of the above, except for contribution to course total, as that is already captured in the percentage total, which is somewhat confusing.
If competencies are enabled, then learners can see their competencies on their profile:
They can also see a summary for competencies within a course:
As well as progress in their learning plan (which can be self-constructed by a learner out of the available competencies):
If course completion is enabled, and learners are permitted to view the course completion block in their course, learners can view their progress towards any criteria required for course completion:
If activity completion is enabled, then learners can see the completion status of activities in the course outline and within activities, as well as the required task to complete and its deadline:
Above: Inside an assignment with a completion criteria set
Above: The Moodle course outline
Above: The Moodle sidebar navigation
This allows learners to see at a glance not only what has and has not been marked as complete, but also to know exactly what must be done for the content to be marked as complete.