What are Course Logs and what are they used for?
Course Logs allow you to track student foot prints from the time they have accessed the course. It allows you to see what resources they have viewed and what activities they have participated in, the time and date they accessed it, the IP address they came from and their actions. You can filter your search to a user, day, activities or action. If your course uses group mode, you will also have the option to limit your search by groups.
Note that the log report can be viewed on a page or downloaded as a text, ODS or Excel format. The log report contains a link that allows you to access a student's profile or a particular page that the student was viewing.
Generating Course Logs
To generate a Log Report for your course:
- Select More... from the drop down menu
at the top right of the course home page. This will open the Course administration page. - From the Course administration page select Logs in the Reports section
- A new page will open with a series of drop down menus.
- Choose your options from the drop down menus
- Course filter: The default is the current course.
- Group filter: If you are using groups in your course, this option will allow you to generate the logs for specific groups of students or everyone. The default value is All groups and is only available if you are using groups in your course.
- Participation filter: Allows you to filter by a specific user or all participants in the course. The default is All participants.
- Day filter: Choose whether you want to filter by a specific day. The default is All days.
- Activity filter: Select an activity or resource from this list to narrow your search option. The default value is All activities.
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Action filter: Select whether to run the report on create, view, update or delete. The default value is All actions.
- Once you have selected the above parameters, click Get these logs. Data matching the criteria you have selected will be listed in a table.
- The table consists of nine columns:
- Time: It contains the date, month and time stamp of the log entry when it was recorded. The year information is not visible on the page, however, when logs are downloaded as a file, it will contain the year.
- User full name: Name of the user is listed in this column. Clicking on the hyperlinked name will open the user's profile page.
- Affected user: It contains the name of the user if the action is related to them.
- Event context: It displays the name of the activity or resource. If the action of the user is not related to either an activity or resource it contains the name of the course.
- Component: It displays the type of the activity or resource. Action not related to either an activity or resource in the course will simply display "System".
- Event name: It displays the event name in relation to users' action. There are four actions that a user can do in Moodle - Create, View, Update and Delete.
- Description: It contains descriptive information about the action performed by the user.
- Origin: It indicates whether the user performed an action using a desktop/laptop or mobile.
- IP address: Shows the IP address of the user.
Downloading Course Logs
Once course logs are displayed on the screen, you can download them as a file using the drop-down menu located at the bottom of the table.
- Select one of the following file-type from the drop-downmenu:
- Comma separated values text file
- Excel spreadsheet
- Unpaged XHTML document
- Javascript Object Notation
- OpenDocument spreadsheet
- Portable Document Format
- Click Download to download the report file to your computer.