Improve data collection task to allow more frequent collection.

[danmarsden]

As mentioned in the readme - the old version of the plugin had a number of shortcomings requiring us to change the way the data collection occurs.

Timespent information is now generated via a scheduled task rather than on page-load - this improves general performance but also enables the data to be exposed within Moodle's new Report Builder custom reporting in a unified way across all courses.

Due to limitations in the amount of initial funding provided to complete the work to improve the plugin and support newer releases, for this release we implemented a simple data-collection process. The new task calculates 'session time' since the last time the task ran so running it every 15min would result in a 40min session generating 3 records for sessions - 2 of 15min and one of 10min instead of a single session for 40min - for this reason, the code currently limits itself to being able to run once every 2 hrs (previous code prevented it from running more than every 6 hrs.)

It would be possible to improve this process so that it can run more frequently and not generate multiple records for a single session, but this would require some development time to implement.

The other stream of development that relates to this is #70 which has the opportunity to provide another method of time collection and could potentially provide more accurate results that the existing data collection method.

[danmarsden]

It's important to note, while I see this being a useful improvement, it requires a good amount of time spent by a developer to improve the process and unless a client decides to fund this development (or if someone with internal development capabilities provides us with a pull request) this is likely to sit here for a while.

[rmartinez-c2]

En la versión que tengo instalada (2023070300) el código impide la recolección de datos en periodos menores de 6 horas. ¿Puedo cambiarlo sin problemas a 2 horas o debo actualizar/sobreescribir algún fichero?

[danmarsden]

@rmartinezgc modifying code without the ability to understand what you are changing is always a risk - safest option is to download the lastest version from github rather than the plugins db - hit the green "code" button on the main page and then the "download" link at the bottom.

[Pedromr78]

Hello, I have changed the time from 2 hours to every 15 minutes and we have a record of a student with 11 seconds, could the change affect that record?