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View Moodle reports

Moodle has a range of reports that track the behaviour of participants in a unit. Educators can utilise this information by making evidenced-informed decisions to adjust resources and scaffolding to optimise understanding and learning. At-risk students can be identified earlier and be provided with the appropriate support. For students, it is important that the purpose for tracking student behaviour is in order to offer help and support, and not to penalise them.

You can structure a unit so that the report data effectively captures student performance and understanding, through ongoing activities (forums, formative quizzes, restricted access items, etc). This would allow the reports to provide signposting for the teaching staff to guide and help students who are struggling with the content.

Help can take the form of direct email to students, announcements, additional resources (curated or created), offering extra classes, revising difficult material in later weeks, etc.

Note: Moodle reports are only capturing student behaviour in Moodle. A student who is doing well in your unit (reading books, writing, and working) might show on Moodle as being very inactive, whereas a student who is struggling (re-reading the same content many times without understanding it) might show as being very active. It’s important to contextualise the data that you can draw on in reports and connect it meaningfully with actions that students need to take.

Archiving of Moodle logs

Beginning in September 2024, Moodle logs will be archived 18 months from the date of creation. After 18 months in the archive (ie. 36 months after creation), the logs will be deleted.

To retrieve logs while archived, please submit a request to the Service Desk.

Retrieved logs are provided in CSV format and can take up to 3 business days to restore.

Accessing Moodle reports

In the top menu of your unit, click on Reports.
Click on the specific report below to learn more about the different types of Moodle reports.

The Alternative Assessment report gives you up to date information regarding students’ alternative arrangements for class tests and/or support for Special Consideration including exams support and non-exams support.
Note: Only staff with the following roles in Moodle can see the report: ‘Administrator’, ‘Lecturer’, and ‘non-Primary Lecturer’.
For more information, see Disability Support Services (Monash staff only).
The Engagement analytics report can be used to quickly view students’ levels of engagement against three different indicators of progress which have been identified by current research to have an impact on student success in an online unit:
- Forum activity
- Login frequency
- Completion of assessments
To work best, assign a weighting to the different indicators to match the relative importance of student participation in forums, assessment submission, and logging into Moodle. Click Update settings in the top right hand corner of the banner to adjust the weightings. Weights are taken into account and an overall “at risk” rating is displayed for each student, with the overall “risk” for each student in the course, ranging from 100%(maximum risk) to 0%(minimum risk).
You can also add an engagement analytics block to provide a simple visual of students’ risk and engagement. For more information, see Engagement analytics in Add blocks in Moodle.
The Logs report allows you to generate a detailed report that can be used to determine the student engagement with a specific activity. There are an extensive number of filters, which can be used to filter either ALL or ONE specific instance.
For example, you can view logs for all students or one individual student, but you cannot view logs for just a subset of the total class. Likewise you can see all of the activities that are viewed, or just one, but you can’t filter to just a single week of activities. This report can be useful to track progress for a single student who is struggling, or if the whole class has done a single activity. Low use may indicate refinement is required.
Live logs are the same as the log report but with no filters. This tool can give you a quick snapshot of all Moodle activities within a one hour window for all students. This can be useful to measure students' activity immediately before or after a scheduled lesson.
The activity report lists all activities in the course and the numbers of views by users of each activity, and when they were last accessed. You can choose to filter the activity within a specific time frame. There is no filter for type of users, so views will also include academics.
You can use the activity report to get a general sense of which types of activities students engage with more often. Scan the report to compare the total number of views and see which activities have higher or lower numbers. Items that are difficult might get more views than usual, while items that are seen as irrelevant might get fewer. You may wish to send email reminders, offer help in chat rooms, provide a document with guidance, or do a class discussion on activities that stand out as having more/fewer views.
The unit participation report shows a filterable list of users or groups and whether they have participated in a specific activity(viewed or posted). This report is an easy method to see which students have not viewed an item, or completed an activity, and to send a message to those students offering help, guidance, or a reminder.
For example, you can choose a group to monitor engagement for a quiz. You can then choose to send a message to all students, or just students who have not completed the quiz, reminding them to complete the quiz.
1. To message students from the Unit participation report, run the report.
2. From the list of students, you can choose to select:
  1. All students: Select the checkbox in the Select column header.
  2. Individual students: Select using the checkboxes in the Select column,
  3. Only students who have not participated in the activity: Click Select all ‘No’
Once you have made your selection, from the ‘With selected users…’ drop down list, select Send a message.
View inactive participants
You can also use filters in your units participants list to quickly view participants who have been inactive on the Moodle site within a specific time period.
Note: This is a very crude tool to monitor student behaviour and may not correlate to student learning or difficulties with the content. Students may not visit Moodle regularly if the content does not require regular visits.
1. Select Participants from the top menu of your Moodle unit.
2. Add ‘student’ as a filter, then add a second filter for the amount of inactive days.
3. You can choose to send a message via Moodle or alternatively you may want to download table data as a spreadsheet which will give you the selected students’ email addresses to then contact via email.
This report can be sorted by group or name and downloaded in 2 different formats. This may require additional manipulation within a spreadsheet.
The activity completion report generates a table of all participants and whether they have completed activities. The report can be alphabetically limited by surname, and can be downloaded as a CSV file. Generally this report type is unwieldy given the greater amount of data captured. If Moodle activities are planned well with the activity completion clearly defined, the information can be used by both students and academics to track progress.
If you download the CSV file, you can manipulate the description of completion with numbers to create an engagement score. This information can then be used to contact students with low engagement to provide support as well as those with high engagement to commend student’s efforts.
For more advanced users, if you download the CSV file to a visualisation program (eg. Tableau), you can create groupings of task types and have an interactive visualisation of completion rates that you can drill down to an individual student level. This type of visualisation is useful to get an overview of student engagement in the unit, by week or activity type, which may inform your design of this or other units.
The statistics report creates line graph visualisations of activity(views and posts of items) over a specific time period. These graphs can be used to quickly scan through the relevant course logs to identify any anomalies.
The Dates report in Moodle is a special report that allows you to view, and then update, all key dates in a unit directly on the dates report page. This has the potential to save time on rollover of units.
For more information, see Use the Moodle dates report.
Displays the distribution of grades from assignments, quizzes, databases, forums, and other gradable activities as a box plot.
For more information, see Use Moodle Analytics Graphs (Grades chart).
View a list of activities and resources on the unit page and how many students have accessed them. You can select the types of activities and/or resources you wish to see displayed.
For more information, see Use Moodle Analytics Graphs (Content access).
The assignment submissions chart presents a list of all assignments in the unit, in the order in which they appear on the unit page. You can view how many students submitted the assignment before the deadline, how many submitted late and how many have not submitted.
For more information, see Use Moodle Analytics Graphs (Assignment submissions).
Displays the number of students accessing the unit and their activities over time. You can view the number of students in the unit at that time and the number of activities in that time (resource clicks, quiz attempts etc.) The time span that this data is collated over is selectable.
For more information, see Use Moodle Analytics Graphs (Number of active students).
Lists all the students enrolled in the unit and logs their activity per week since the start of the unit which makes it easy to see trends in student access.
For more information, see Use Moodle Analytics Graphs (Hits distribution).
Moodle has a built-in tool to check broken and inaccessible links for you in your units. Whenever you roll over your unit it is advised to use this tool to check if any external or internal hyperlinks have become inaccessible since the unit was last updated. It can also be used at any time throughout the semester.
For more information, see Check Moodle for broken links.

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Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

View Moodle reports

Archiving of Moodle logs

Accessing Moodle reports

View inactive participants

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