Why Seat Time is Not Always Accurate

I just had a question from a teacher about student seat time. When you click on a student's name and see his or her list of units for a course, you'll notice a seat time column is included.

In the example above, notice that my student only spent 1 minute on Unit 4. How can this be? How can a student earn a 96% when he only spent 1 minute on the unit? Impossible? Maybe not...

The VLA system does track students' seat time. This is the time that the student spends actively working on each unit of study. However, the student must complete one crucial step for his or her seat time to be recorded correctly. The student must log out of VLA using the small black X in the upper right corner of the screen. If the student does not log out correctly, his or her seat time is not recorded. The work that the student completed stays, but the time disappears.

This may seem unfair to the students, but it is actually a safety measure. Picture this scenario: A student working from home turns on her computer and then walks away, trying to make it look like she was working on VLA all day. The student believes that hours upon hours of seat time is logged. Of course the student didn't submit any work, but she tried to make it look like she had been busy.

The VLA system has a safety net for situations like these. The system logs the student out after 55 minutes of inactivity. The screen may look like an active screen, but, in the background, the connection has been broken. The student's seat time was never logged.
All of this means that students who are truly working need to log out correctly each and every time they use VLA. This will record their seat time, giving them credit (time-wise) for the hard work that they have done. In the case of my student in the picture above, he did not log out correctly. I know that he is a hard worker who usually earns high scores for his work. The work was done -- quite well in fact! -- and I could tell that it was done by him. The one minute seat time report simply showed that he did not log off correctly.

So what does this mean for you as a VLA teacher? Please do not assume that your students are cheating or not working hard just because their seat time numbers are low. Instead, write them an email message letting them know how to log off correctly. I've found that telling students that logging off correctly will ensure that they "get credit for" their seat time motivates them to click the X when they are done. They want credit for every moment of work that they have done! And they deserve that credit.