Moodle - Platform-Level Analytics and Reporting

While there doesn’t appear to be a native analytics dashboard at the site-level, only the course-level, Moodle administrators can access a reports dashboard with the following reports:

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• Comments - Allows admins to review all comments posted across all courses and areas of the site, and delete them. This dashboard is reportedly “completely useless” as it has few filtering options, and is simply a list with delete buttons.

• Backups - Shows a list of all course backups taken, as well as logs and status reports for the process of taking the backup.

• Config changes - Provides logs of admin activity on the Moodle site. Who changed what, and when.

• Course overview - Provides a wide range of course reports, including:

  • 20 Highest Participation Courses - Defining participation as views divided by posts (posts being any user submission to a tool, including assignment submissions, quiz attempts, and forum posts)

    • Can also be defined as enrolled learners divided by active learners

  • Most Active Courses - Highest numbers of active learners

  • Assignment Views: view ; 

    • Assignment Posts: upload

  • Chat Views: view, view all, report; 

    • Chat Posts: talk

  • Choice Views: view, view all, report; 

    • Chat Posts: choose, choose again

  • Database Views: view; 

    • Database Posts: add, update, record delete

  • Forum Views: view discussion, search, forum, forums, subscribers;

    • Forum Posts: add discussion, add post, delete discussion, delete post, move discussion, prune post, update post

  • Glossary Views: view, view all, view entry; 

    • Glossary Posts: add category, add comment, add entry, approve entry, delete category, delete comment, delete entry, edit category, update comment, update entry

  • Lesson Views: view, view all; 

    • Lesson Posts: end, start, update grade attempt

  • Quiz Views: view, view all, report; 

    • Quiz Posts: attempt, edit questions, review, submit

  • Resource Views: view, view all; 

  • SCORM/AICC Views: preview, view, view all, report;

  • Survey Views: download, view all, view form, view graph, view report; 

    • Survey Posts: submit

• Events list

  • A filterable list of all tracked event actions taken by all users on the site

  • The list can be filtered to show specific components (core, Assignment, Book etc) levels (Teaching, Participating, Other) and database query types (create,delete, read, update).

• Antivirus Failures

  • Provides access to quarantined files that were rejected by the platform antivirus

• Logs

  • Records actions taken by users

• Live Logs

  • As logs, but a live event stream that can be watched or paused

• Performance overview

  • Displays the status of performance-enhancing plugins and settings, and controls whether they are enabled.

  • Common consensus seems to be that this isn’t really in the right place, but it’s good enough and there isn’t a better place.

• Question instances

  • Shows a list of all questions of each type across the site, where they are used, and how often.

  • Purpose is to identify where questions were created at the course level when they should really have been created as system or category defaults. To put it another way, a course with an extremely high number of questions of a specific type is typically using very little question bank content.

• Security checks

  • Shows the status of various security-related settings, and provides controls to enable them

  • Similar to Performance Overview, in that it’s not really a data report, but there’s not a convenient other place to put it.

• Statistics

  • Provides access to course-level statistics for each course

  • Covered in more depth in the course-level analytics doc, but essentially simply shows course activity over time for students and facilitators

• System status

  • Provides status reporting for the following:

    • Environment - whether the server environment meets all minimum requirements

    • Upgrade - whether an upgrade is recommended

    • Cron - whether the cron is running frequently

    • Tasks max fail delay - whether there are any tasks failing

    • Ad hoc task queue - whether the ad hoc task queue is empty

• Accessibility toolkit

  • This “report” is actually configuration for a third-party plugin product, the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit. There is a free version that appears to be included with Moodle by default, but requires setup like any integration

  • Once configured, provides reports on courses that failed automated accessibility checks

• Event monitoring rules

  • Allows rules to be defined for admins and course staff to notify them when specific events happen. Admins can define preset events that staff can then opt into from their own settings.

• Spam cleaner

  • Allows the admin to search learner-submitted comments for common spam keywords, and delete them

Third-party plugins can add to this report list. It’s not 100% clear what is in every one of these options, as they are not all clearly documented. It’s possible that some of these could be plugins rather than core Moodle, as this is a screenshot from a core Moodle tutorial video. It’s possible they mistakenly showed some plugins in passing.

The general theme, however, is that each report provides a visual interface for interpreting the results of database queries, and this can be used with the custom report builder to create reports on pretty much anything that exists within the database. This diagram is how they explain the process for Moodle Workplace users:

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When creating a report, you first have to select a source, which is the table the data is pulled from:

When the source is selected, the columns available in the table appear down the left hand side of the report builder interface. The centre of the builder displays a preview of the columns available, and the right hand panel allows the administrator to set up the report in different ways:

• Conditions apply conditions to the query, such as “Course completed: Yes”
  
  

• Filters set which filters are available to end users of the report, such as allowing them to filter the results by username, or course to filter by a specific course.
  
  

• Sorting allows you to set the default sorting criteria for the report
  
  

• Card View allows you to set how the report displays on small screens. Why this is necessary, I’m unsure, but suspect it may simply be working around questionable frontend decisions:
  
  

It does not appear to be possible to combine reports from multiple tables in this report builder, which is a huge downside. This is likely a large part of why there’s an extensive marketplace of third-party Moodle analytics plugins. This means, for example, you can’t easily cross-reference data without downloading it and using Excel.

Once constructed, the audience of who has access to the report is defined from the Audience tab, which allows you to define permissions for access, and the new automated report can be scheduled to run at certain times, such as daily or weekly. 

There appear to be no easy visualisations of data available in standard Moodle reporting. There are many plugins that offer this, as well as tools that work with many other LMSes, such as Intelliboard, which seem to exist to effectively answer this weakness in most LMS platforms.