Managing student participation with Moodle generated reports

The report features of Moodle allow you to get an idea of when and how students are accessing and participating in your courses. The level of participation and quality of participation might be useful for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) as a gauge as to the effectiveness of your teaching strategies and material. If a student is not meeting their targets, but claims that they are spending the requisite number of hours on the online material, it is easy enough to create a report about this to see if they are indeed logging on at home and what they are looking at. For example, you could choose the Participation report under the reports menu on the course, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can select the homework assignment activity or activities, and quickly see who has accessed them. The following screenshot shows a report of student's activity (or lack thereof) on the assignments associated with a Food Technology course. In this case, three students have not read the material set for homework so they are not allowed to undertake a practical assignment in class as they are underprepared.