Filtering Participants

In our previous article we examined how you can use Excel to filter a set of data. Through the next few articles we will look at how you can filter data within Moodle to be more productive. In this article we examine how a teacher can filter on participants.

Filtering in Moodle

Filtering data in Moodle allows you to quickly find the data you are interested in and to remove some of the noise. Finding data quickly allows you to spend more time analysing it and less time gathering it. It can become difficult to scroll through the students to find the ones you are interested in as your courses and student base grows. You may need to identify students that meet specific criteria; applying filtering to the participants list allows you to do this quickly, easily and accurately.

Examples

The examples used in these articles come from the Mount Orange School Moodle Demo (https://school.moodledemo.net). Not all options may be available in your own Moodle site. Some may look different or be located in different places. For this article we will focus on using filtering as a teacher.

Filtering participants

You first need to enter the course which you are interested in. From there, enter the Participants page. Here you have the ability to set up and apply multiple filters to locate the students you are interested in. These filters include Keyword, Status, Roles, Enrolment methods, Groups and their period of inactivity. Click on the Select box and select your desired filter.

Make your selections for the values to filter on. These may be available from a dropdown menu or you may be able to enter values.

You can filter on multiple conditions by clicking on the Add condition button. You then need to determine how these conditions are combined. This is performed using the Match dropdown menu. The options are as follows:

• Any is an OR condition – if a given student matches any of the supplied filters they will be returned
• All is an AND condition – a student must meet all of the supplied filters to be returned
• None is a FALSE condition – if a student does not meet any of the supplied filters then they will be returned.

Make sure to click the Apply filters button to apply the filtering you have set up.

Filtering scenarios

The participants page can be very useful for managing the students that you are teaching. There are several actions that you can take from this page and filtering the students will make it much easier to find the relevant students and to take your required actions quickly. Some example filtering scenarios are listed below – what others can you see?

• Locating the email address of students that you need to contact
• Editing the role of one or more students
• Identifying students that have been inactive for a period of time so you can prompt them to log in
• Changing the groups the students are members of
• Editing the enrolment of the student.

Filtering participants within Moodle makes it much easier to find the data you are interested in, reducing the time spent searching for students and allowing you to be more productive. Understanding – and making use of – the filtering options within Moodle will make you a more effective teacher.

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Jeff Mitchell

P&C Reporting and Data Analyst at Fisher & Paykel Appliances

Jeff is passionate about the role of learning and development, and has a specific interest in how people and organisations can be developed in order to achieve their potential. Jeff has a keen interest in information technology and specifically data analysis and the e-learning space.

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