7 comments
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Adam Sentz A while ago we added Time Tracking under the Reporting tab in a course instance which lets you see how much time a student has spent in that particular course. You can filter by student, dates, and minutes spent.
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Paul Stamm I would really like more information on how the time tracking functions. One interest area - how long can a student be idle before the time tracking shows the student absence. I suppose how long before "times out." If I embed a YouTube video - I assume the Populi record include all of the time video is playing, but if the student goes "full screen" does it still count all? I suppose if they click through to watch on YouTube - that time is not recorded? I would like to know more about how Populi is determining the connection time.
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Adam Sentz @Paul - Populi has a one hour time-out so the longest a user can go without any activity in Populi before they are logged out is one hour. If they full screen a YouTube video it's possible that they'd time out while they were watching it if it was an hour or more long and Populi couldn't detect any activity from them during that time. Populi can't track time users spend on other sites so if they click out to YouTube or another site it won't be able to report on that time.
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Melinda Autry Is the time format in tracking hrs:mins or mins:secs? Thanks!
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Adam Sentz Melinda Autry - Hours and minutes. If you have further questions please open a support request.
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Douglas Giudici I caught a student who simultaneously signed into five different classes and streamed seven lesson videos length 50-70 minutes, in a 75-minute block of time. This is a clear academic integrity violation, but it is hard to document without an exact start and end time of each video activity.
The time tracking is also full of bugs:
1. It will keep tracking time until someone does something. I have several instances of a lesson time being 10 hours because the student fell asleep watching a video.
2. Especially with poor internet connections, it will stop tracking progress but continue playing a video. I have seen students literally watch a video four times in a row and only have credit for watching the first 30 minutes of the video once.
3. The lesson time and individual video times rarely match. I could understand a student spending seventy minutes in a lesson, but only fifty-three of them on a video. But a student spends fifty-three minutes in a lesson, but completing a seventy-minute video in the lesson window?




This student started the 20-hour day after 8 pm.
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Adam Sentz Douglas Giudici - The technical limitations around time-tracking are significant, but there may be areas we can improve. If you'd like to make feature requests around any of those individually you can do that here. This request was completed over a decade ago so I'm going to go ahead and close it.