Optimizing the Access Records of Students in the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment Database

Abstract

Moodle is a freeware solution for Learning Management System (LMS) applied to Virtual Learning Environments (VLS). Despite the several features to support online courses, some desirable information is not easily provided, for instance, the amount of time the user spent in the system or in a specific course. A custom implementation can measure the time spent on the user's searches into the internal Moodle log and the distance between the records through the session time. However, for a large number of recorded logs, searching a single record passing through the other records requires a large time processing. As a consequence, the generation of custom reports is also costly. This work proposes a realtime plugin for Moodle to count the time spent by a student logged into the system retrieving the information from a pre-computed central table. The objective of the solution is to improve the counting precision and allow a faster retrieval of data. Our proposed plugin is validated using real data from the National School of Public Administration (Enap) in Brazil.