The Moodle dedicated analysis model

The Moodle analysis model is a key information to guess what can be observed in reports. Trimane Open Analytics for Moodle provides the report generator among with an appropriate extraction and data analysis model that enfocusses specially over Moodle data model.

The extraction model defines:

• Which indicators were elected: i.e., measurable values that will be used as base calculation for the reports.
• The elected qualifiers for those indicators: i.e., dimensions and axis that will allow dig in or out in the whole results to see very general trends or conversely very local phenomenons.

Finaly, assembling indicators and qualifiers on a selected data source defines what we call an analysis domain which will encompass a certain scope of questions a Learning Manager can ask to the tool.

Domain 1: User's action in the platform

This domain uses essentially as data source the log records stored in the main log table of Moodle. Users generally deposit an action code when they are triggering each content page within Moodle, generally denoting a use case being executed. These actions can have several contexts that can be used for analysis.

Detail of indicators and axis of exploration

Domain 2: Role assignation structure

Analysis of role's structure will use the role assignation information. It will analyse the evolution of role status among the time. conversely to the previous domain that considers an event flow incoming "on the fly", the input for this domain is a regular snapshot of role assignations mapping.

The analysis domain will also extract information about orphan users (who have no explicit assignations anywhere) or orphan contexts (context -- usually course -- that have no explicit roles assigned to)

Detail of indicators and axis of exploration

Domain 3: The document structure

The document set analysis uses information extracted from the Global Search Engine of Moodle denoting of existence of documents (or assimilated). The Global Search engine must be enabled for some results to be available in this domain.

Detail of indicators and axis of exploration

Domain 4: The interpersonal communications

Analysing interpersonal communications can tell a lot about learning community dynamism. It will be based on any message-like transmission that can be obervered between a pair of users. The source information comes from forums, messaging and chats.

Forum posts are translated to appear as interpersonal communications: A forum post in a thread will be considered as being an answer message from the author to the author of the upper post; A head message will be treated as a communication from the sender to potentially all suscribers in this forum.

Messaging messages are considered as straight-away interpersonal communications.

Submissions to synchronous chats are messages immediately sent from the submitter to each member of the audience.

Detail of indicators and axis of exploration

Domain 5: The grade and evaluation structure

The analysis of grades considers each grade as a single event that can be qualified by several elements of its context.

(the grade model is still on work)

Detail of indicators and axis of exploration

Last modified: Saturday, 16 January 2010, 01:28 AM