ADVANCED ANALYTICS IN MAHARA

AAIM Project

Context of the project

HEFCE Catalyst Fund:

● short-term

● project-based activity

● emphasis on collaboration

“The benefits arising from Catalyst funding to students, to the public and to universities and colleges as a whole

should outweigh those to the institutions receiving funding.”

● Address recognised limitations in Mahara’s reporting capability

● Engage the community internationally

● Contribute to the maturation of an open source learning technology system

Aims of the project

Steered by peers:

reference group

drawn from 6 UK

HEIs:

● University of the Highlands and

Islands

● Cranfield University

● Gloucestershire University

● University of Warwick

● Edinburgh Napier University

● Royal Veterinary College

Open development

Developing code as

contribution to the

core open source

software

Development partners Catalyst

Open survey:

responses received

from institutions in

seven countries:

● Australia

● China

● Czech Republic

● England

● Ireland

● Scotland

● Switzerland

1 2 3

Activity by

users

Activity within

“Pages”

Development of reports and reporting capability:

Project Outputs

Enabling timeframe filtering within all these reports

Group

activity

Collaboration

activity

Currently, only the most recent modification date of a page/artefact is retained

The project development will:

● add new tables to the database to store & retain a record of all

modifications

● make this data available within the four reports to be developed

● make this data available for download

Reports: Timeframe Filtering

Enhancing existing “Most

popular pages” report

All pages created, edited,

visited or commented on

during the set timeframe

are returned

Reports: Page Activity

New report, showing all user

accounts in place at any

point within the timeframe

Captured actions are:

● create / modify an artefact

(including personal pages

and collections, group

pages)

● post to a forum

● make a comment

● view a page

Reports: User Activity

Reports: Collaboration Activity

New report

Shows, for each week

within the timeframe,

relevant actions taken by

all users within the

selected institution

Enhancement of current

“Groups” report

Shows activity for all

Groups that exist at any

point within the selected

timeframe

Reports: Group Activity

Direction of Travel

Analytics vision: providing meaningful data for students and teachers to

guide learning - personal dashboards & visualisations

Recognising that Mahara is likely to be just one part of the picture: API

access for aggregation of data with other sources

Underpinning principle: measuring what we value, not simply valuing

whatever we can measure

Steering through core software

change management

Intended inclusion in October

2017 Mahara release (v17.10)

Next steps

Promotion of a direction for further development

Evaluation and presentation of

the Mahara reporting

developments via case studies

David Walker

@drdjwalker

Antony Coombs

@antonycoombshe

Innovation, collaboration and openness: advancing analytics in Mahara

Mark Glynn

@glynnmark

Lisa Donaldson

@dubdonaldson

http://www.aaimproject.com