View student login logs, class access statistics, etc.
Clicking on this Configuration menu item leads to another menu:
Here's the big picture. Internally, Manhattan records, for both the students and the teacher, the date and time of each of the following transactions:
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when a user logs-in to the classroom
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when a user opens a message for the first time
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when a user sends a message
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when a user enters the Chat room
The first four items on the Statistics Menu allow the teacher to view summaries of these transactions. The overall intent of this feature is to give the teacher a way to gauge the participation of her students within the virtual classroom. The last item, Disk Usage gives the teacher some additional information on the state of the Manhattan server. The following sections explore these options in the order they are listed in the menu.
Specify Start and End dates
- Specify Start and End dates
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A few tracking features on this menu need to know the start and end dates of this course. Go here to specify these dates for the first time, or to change them as needed.
If you use the statistics features described within this section, you'll eventually need to specify the dates your course begins and ends, since this information is needed by some of the programs. Clicking on the link yields the form:
The description shown on the form should be self-explanatory. Note that you can come back here to change the dates of your course as often as you wish.
Recent logins
This is perhaps the statistics feature you'll use most often. Clicking on the link yields a table similar to the following:
The table lists all of the people in the class and shows the date and time of the last ten times they have logged in to the classroom. The table also shows the total number of times they have logged in, as well as the number of unread messages they have waiting for them.
You'll note that each name is a hyperlink. Clicking on a name yields the Event Calendar for that person, which is also available via a separate choice on the statistics menu as described next.
Event Calendar
Select a name from the list you'll see after making this selection and click the button to view that person's Event Calendar:
The event calendar shows, for each day within the range specified by the start and end dates of your class, the following activities:
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the time of each log-in (shown as a "smiley face")
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the time a new message became available for a person to read (shown as a yellow envelope)
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the time a message was read for the first time (shown as binoculars)
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the time the person composed a new message (shown as a hand addressing an envelope)
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the time the person entered the live Chat area (shown as a talking face icon)
Positioning your mouse over, or clicking on, one of the symbols will give you some detailed information about the event.
Two activities are NOT depicted on the calendar, or anywhere else within the statistics menus:
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when the student accessed the Grades module
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all activities within the Anonymous Discussion module.
When you learn about the Grades module in The Grades Module, you'll see how to find out when students have checked their grades. Tracking activity within the Anonymous Discussion, see About the Anonymous Discussion module, would make it possible to deduce who posted certain messages and so the information is hidden from all users.
Event List
Here's what an Event List looks like:
The Event List shows the exact same information about an individual's activity within the classroom as the Event Calendar (see Event Calendar above), except it is presented in a simple table.
Disk Usage
Here's a typical report:
Demo 101: Disk Usage as of Fri 06/08/2001 08:38 PM
This classroom is currently using 692 kilobytes of disk space. (A kilobyte is 1,024 characters.)
The 'disk free' (df) command on the server yields the following report.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 7.8G 1.1G 6.3G 15% /
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Manhattan's Disk Usage command simply runs a program on your server called df ( which stands for 'disk free'), and shows you the results. In the above example, we learn that our Demo classroom is using just 692K of disk space. The server has 6.3 Gigabytes of free space left.
This information is provided to the teacher only as a point of information. Some day you might wonder if there's enough room on the server for that huge streaming video file you'd like to make available for your students!