Best practice forum (Archived)

Report on new activities and courses added

 
John Le Rossignol
Report on new activities and courses added
by John Le Rossignol - Wednesday, 29 August 2012, 9:06 AM
 

Is it possible to generate a report or log of new activities and courses added in the last week/month etc?

New courses would be of some use, but even more useful would be any activities or resources added to existing courses, e.g. new face-to-face sessions, and other resources.

David Curry (Core Developer)
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by David Curry (Core Developer) - Wednesday, 29 August 2012, 2:23 PM
Group Totara

Hi John,

If you use the report builder and create a courses report including name and any other fields you want, and the course start date. Then make a filter on start date saying 'is after' and set the date to a month ago, this should be what you are looking for.
At the moment you would have to reset the date on the filer each time, though I believe adding an automatic "within the past week/month/year" option to the report builder has recently made it onto the todo list. So hopefully you'll see that functionality soon.

Hope that helps
David

David Curry (Core Developer)
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by David Curry (Core Developer) - Wednesday, 29 August 2012, 5:29 PM
Group Totara

Hi again,

I just found out that this DOES exist, under the content tab not the filter tab. you can set show by the start date to the last 30 days.

John Le Rossignol
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by John Le Rossignol - Thursday, 30 August 2012, 2:10 AM
 

Thanks David - that's some help, but it won't show if any activities or resources have been added to existing courses. Any ideas anyone apart from a manual log for all course creators/admins?

John

Craig Eves
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Thursday, 30 August 2012, 4:00 PM
Group Totara

Hi John

It is possible to use the site log report source in the report builder  to get information on courses added and modules added.

The  information is available under the action field with the value

course new for new courses

course add mod for new modules

The info field gives more details such as the type of activity added

The could be filtered to only show these actions and then exported into a spreadsheet for doing the analysis of how many of each have been added over a period. Using pivot tables and grouping the time field by month should hopefully enable you to show the summary you are after.

regards

Craig

John Le Rossignol
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by John Le Rossignol - Friday, 31 August 2012, 1:56 AM
 

Many thanks Craig, that's useful. I don't really need stats on number of activities added - just information on what has been added so I can make people aware of new resources.

I used your method with 'course add mod' for action, which does show which courses we have added anything to. The only problem is it's quite difficult to identify the name of the resource/activity added - e.g. info says 'resource 546' but it's difficult to identify what that means if there are several resources on the course page. I tried clicking the link in the report to IP address but that gives an error message:

Can not connect to NetGeo server at http://netgeo.caida.org, please check proxy settings or better install MaxMind GeoLite City data file

I tried adding 'URL' to the report but that column was empty. It would be useful if a link in the report opened the new activity/resource.

Thanks for your help anyway - any further tips appreciated.

John

 

Craig Eves
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Sunday, 2 September 2012, 3:47 PM
Group Totara

Hi John

You are right the information column should be looked at in the site log report source to provide more informative information

The link to the resource that is provided by the action linked to URL column works for me in the report on the demo site - does the URL in your report look like a URL OK ie includes your site name and module identifier  https://demo.totaralms.com/mod/forum/view.php?id=115

Unfortunately the URL doesn't get retained when exporting this to the spreadsheet.

The Information column is the logical place to provide details on the resource - this provides good information for actions such as upload where the URL of the uploaded file is shown in this field.

Craig

John Le Rossignol
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by John Le Rossignol - Monday, 3 September 2012, 6:33 AM
 

Hi Craig

The action link just says something like 'course view' and then links to the URL ID of the course page, e.g. https://learning.rnli2.org.uk/course/view.php?id=321

But this does not identify the resource/activity modified.

The info column just says something like 'Label 1447', which is difficult to identify which one it means.

John

 

Craig Eves
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Monday, 3 September 2012, 6:31 PM
Group Totara

Hi John

The link to click on should be ones that say add eg forum add - this link should direct you to the forum that was added where you can get some more details on it  (this isn't automated though).

Craig

John Le Rossignol
Re: Report on new activities and courses added
by John Le Rossignol - Tuesday, 4 September 2012, 2:05 AM
 

Thanks Craig - yes that works well.

John