CODEWITHSUNDEEP
moodle
Pierre123
Pierre123

Reputation: 3

How to put a timer on moodle?

I wonder whether this plugin could fit our purpose : we would like to make sure that our participants spend at least 3 hours on their course otherwise their CPD fees might not be paid for by their sponsors. The idea would be to have a visual indication of the time one has spent on their course, while giving these people the opportunity to spend more time on the course if they wish to do so.

Thanks for helping, Best,

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1106

Answers (2)

Trust O.M
Trust O.M

Reputation: 1

Have you tried using Moodle lesson activity where you can set activity completion criteria as "Student must do this activity at least for X minutes"

You can then set access restriction based on the activity completion criteria such that users cannot continue the other module until they first complete prior module/activities.

Upvotes: 0

davosmith
davosmith

Reputation: 6317

Have you considered how you would define "time spent on course"?

Is it the total of the time between the user's first opening of one of the pages of the course and them logging out? (or timing out, assuming they just close their browser window and don't hit "log out")

That doesn't work very well, as the user can easily open their browser, log into the course, then, 30 seconds later, close their browser and walk away - so does that count as 2 hours usage (until their session times out)?

Or you could try tracking each page load and counting up the time between the first page load of a session and the last page load of the session? But a user could still be watching Netflix in another browser window and every hour or so, just click on a link in the training window.

Do you put some sort of artificial limit in there - e.g "each click must be within 5 minutes of each other to count as the same session" - that won't work if one of the pages is a 15 minute video, or a document that takes 10 minutes to read.

Could you measure the time the server spent generating the pages for the user to view? (Not really a serious suggestion, as the server would only take a fraction of a second to generate each page viewed - but, realistically, that's the amount of time that the LMS is actually being accessed directly by the user)

If you really want to track the user's time spent on the course, you'd have to resort to extremely invasive measures - locking down the browser so that the user cannot switch away from the training tab, using a webcam to track their movements, to make sure they're actually there looking at the screen and interacting with the site.

The end result of this - a user has "clocked-in" and, for whatever definition you want to use, added up the required amount of time on the course.

Ultimately - time spent is a fairly meaningless measure and almost impossible to measure accurately anyway. A much more useful metric is to use assessment to determine if the user has actually learnt what you want them to learn - it doesn't really matter if a user has spent 5 minutes on a course or 3 hours - if they can demonstrate that they understand the topic, then the training has been successful.

Upvotes: 1

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