Answers one question MasterStudy LMS cannot: is this student actually active?
MasterStudy tells you which courses a student enrolled in. It does not tell you whether they ever watched anything, or when. This plugin adds that — a sortable list of every student with their last-active date, activity streak and membership status, plus a per-student timeline.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by StyleMix Themes, the makers of MasterStudy LMS.
Student names and addresses above are fictional.
MasterStudy records lesson activity in two places, and both have a blind spot:
| What | Where | Blind spot |
|---|---|---|
| Lesson completed | {prefix}stm_lms_user_lessons.end_time |
Only if the student clicks Complete |
| Lesson first opened | usermeta stm_lms_course_started_{lesson}_{course} |
Written once, and deleted on completion |
STM_LMS_Course::lesson_started() writes the "opened" timestamp only if it is not already set, and
STM_LMS_Lesson::complete_lesson() deletes it on completion. So a student re-watching material
they already finished leaves no trace at all.
On the site this was built for, of 127 paying members: 33 looked like they had never touched a lesson if you counted only completions — but only 8 genuinely never had. The other 25 were watching without ever clicking Complete.
This plugin backfills everything MasterStudy already knows, then records lesson views itself from that point on — including the re-watches.
MasterStudy LMS → Student Activity
- Every student with last active, active days (in each window), lessons completed, courses touched and membership status
- Status badges — Active / Slipping / Dormant / Never started, with configurable thresholds
- Summary tiles, and filters for status, membership, course and free-text search
- Per-student drill-down: per-course breakdown and a day-by-day activity timeline
- CSV export of whatever is currently filtered
- Paid Memberships Pro integration, when present, to separate paying members from lapsed ones
- WordPress 6.0 or newer (tested up to 7.1)
- PHP 7.4+
- MasterStudy LMS (free edition is enough — the hooks used are in the free plugin)
- Paid Memberships Pro (optional) — enables the membership column and filter
Download student-activity-masterstudy-x.y.z.zip from the
latest release
and upload it via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
Use the release zip, not GitHub's "Source code (zip)". The auto-generated one unpacks to a folder named after the tag, which WordPress treats as a different plugin on every version.
- Copy the plugin folder into
wp-content/plugins/, or upload the zip via Plugins → Add New. - Activate. The table is created and a one-time import of your existing history is queued.
- Open MasterStudy LMS → Student Activity. The import runs in the background via WP-Cron; a notice shows progress and there is a Run import now button if cron is unreliable on your host.
The import is idempotent — re-running it never duplicates anything.
One table, {prefix}mssa_activity, holding one row per student per item per event type per day:
UNIQUE KEY uniq_daily (user_id, item_id, event, event_date)That unique key is load-bearing rather than merely a constraint. Combined with INSERT IGNORE it:
- makes repeat views collapse into a single row, capping table growth,
- turns "distinct active days" into a plain
COUNT(DISTINCT event_date), - and removes the need to check before writing, so a lesson view costs at most one query.
Live capture hooks stm_lms_lesson_started, which fires on every render of the course player
for a student with access — not just the first. That is what catches re-watches.
Backfill imports two passes: completions and first-opens from stm_lms_user_lessons, then
opened-but-never-completed from usermeta. The usermeta keys exist in two formats — MasterStudy
migrates an old ..._{course}_{lesson} form to ..._{lesson}_{course} lazily — so both are parsed.
On the reference dataset the legacy form was 63% of rows.
The plugin is built for sites that are already heavy.
| Context | Cost |
|---|---|
| Any front-end page that is not a lesson | 0 queries, 0 CSS, 0 JS |
| A lesson view | 1 INSERT IGNORE, or 0 with a persistent object cache |
| Admin list, first view | 2 queries |
| Admin list, repeat sort / filter / page | 0 queries (cached 12h) |
Admin CSS loads only on this plugin's own screen. There is no front-end asset, no external request, and no scheduled recompute — the report is cached lazily on read, so it costs nothing on days you do not open it.
If you install a persistent object cache (Redis, Memcached, APCu), repeat lesson views cost zero writes rather than one.
All data stays in your own database. Nothing is sent anywhere. The plugin records which lesson a logged-in student opened and when — no IP addresses, no user agents, no page-level tracking.
Deactivating changes nothing. Deleting the plugin keeps your data unless you tick Delete the activity table when this plugin is deleted in Settings first, because view history cannot be reconstructed once gone.
MasterStudy LMS → Student Activity → Settings
| Setting | Default | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Active within | 30 days | |
| Dormant after | 90 days | Between the two is "Slipping" |
| Count opening a lesson | on | Turn off to count only completions. Recommended on — many students never click Complete |
| Delete data on uninstall | off |
Thresholds are applied at query time, so changing them reclassifies everyone instantly with no reprocessing.
Issues and pull requests welcome: https://github.com/POBrien333/student-activity-masterstudy
The plugin is deliberately dependency-free — no Composer, no build step, plain PHP and one
stylesheet. Clone it straight into wp-content/plugins/ and it runs.
Areas that would benefit most from other people's setups:
- Quizzes and assignments — the reference site uses neither, so those paths are lightly exercised
- WPML / multisite
- MasterStudy versions other than free 3.7.x / Pro 4.8.x
GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.