MAV

Moodle Activity Viewer is an open-source Greasemonkey user script that visualises student activity within the Moodle LMS. It does this not with tables or graphs, but instead using a heat map - colouring links lighter or darker according to how often they are accessed as illustrated below.

The heat map can represent a range of usage information including

• Total number of students to have clicked on a link
• Number of clicks on a link

These representations can be shown for all students, selected Moodle groups of students, and individual students.

Requirements

MAV works only with the Firefox web browser at this time.

The following is required to make use of MAV:

• Greasemonkey Firefox Addon
• A webserver (e.g. Apache) to install the web-service component of MAV To generate the heat map MAV communicates with this web service to get the usage information.
• Access to the Moodle DB (or a copy) by the MAV web-service The web service has to query a database to get the usage information. ItÕs currently written to use an aggregated table calculated from the Moodle database.
• A little patience, as this is still emerging and experimental software

Installation

MAV was written for use at CQUniversity Australia. Installing MAV for users at your institution will require a little effort on your part. It is advised to contact the creator, Damien Clark for assistance. An installation guide will be made available soon.

A quick tour of the features

• Generate heatmaps according to the number of clicks on each link, or the number of individual students who clicked each link
• The heatmaps can be shown on any Moodle page (such as Course Home, Discussion Forums, Moodle Pages, Moodle Books, Blackboard Collaborate Recordings, and so on)
• The results can be filtered by Moodle groups (e.g. show only Distance students)
• When used with CQUniversity's Early Alerts Student Indicators (EASI) System, you can see heatmaps of individual student activity.
• At the click of a button, identify students who have and haven't accessed resources and activities directly within the page
• Optionally visualise results by font size (think Wordle or tag cloud) instead of changing colours as an accessibility option for colour-blindness

Further Information

A blog post - The Moodle Activity Viewer (MAV) - Heatmaps of Student Activity provides further information about MAV.

Licence

MAV is licenced under the terms of the GPLv2.