13 July 2017, 1:45

In Moodle, I know about the extensive logging of everything happening on the server for every user and every click/deletion/change etc. 

Is there something similar in the Mahara (16.10) frontend an admin can use? I found the statistics, but I'm looking for more detailed user logs of what a user has done in his/her portfolio and when he/she may have changed/deleted a segment or component of the portfolio.

13 July 2017, 2:46

Hi Joost, look at this project: Advanced Analytics in Mahara

"The AAIM project sought input from the Mahara community on the type of learning analytics that would be useful for students, lecturers and administrators. A Google survey was created and shared through social media and supported by Kristina Hoeppner from Mahara.

The survey drew 20 responses from institutions nationally and internationally. These were reviewed and collated to identify the key areas to consider for development through the project. Some general categories or themes in requirements emerged from the review. At this early stage in the project, it seems that the key areas to Mahara users in institutional reporting/metrics are:

Reports which indicate:

• The degree of collaborative engagement: Provide evidence of collaboration & engagement internally and with outside organisations such as prospective employers
• The degree of eportfolio usage by groups: Provide evidence of lecturer and student engagement with the eportfolio on a group by group basis
• Degree of use by institution: Provide evidence of lecturer and student engagement with the eportfolio on an institution by institution basis
• Degree of use by student: Show engagement with the eportfolio on a student by student basis
• Management Reporting/Success Factors: Provide metrics suitable for management reporting on the degree of use and efficacy of the eportfolio platform
• Student Usage behaviour: Provide a closer look at how students use and interact with the eportfolio platform
• Tagging: focusses on the use of tagging in the eportfolio which can provide evidence of the type of pages students are creating and competencies gained
• Teacher usage behaviour: Identify the number of teachers engaging with the eportfolio platform and the type and degree of that engagement
• Technical issues: To be used to identify platform downtime and issues
• Type of use: Provide evidence on how the platform is being used;  pages/resources considered useful and evidence of the types of artefacts collated"

Looking forward to see some first results coming out of this project. Last update from the project website is from Feb 11.

For more information about the project look at: https://aaimproject.com/about/

13 July 2017, 15:17

Hello Joost and Bas,

The AAIM project would have been the one I would have pointed you to as well. ;-) It is in active development and you can check out the code at https://reviews.mahara.org/#/q/status:open+project:mahara+branch:master+topic:Analytics Additional patch sets will be added.

If you want to test the reporting side, all you need (at the time of writing) is https://reviews.mahara.org/7818

We are working on the Elasticsearch upgrade (not part of the AAIM project but required by it) to a more modern version of Elasticsearch. The new reporting will hook into Elasticsearch as the queries are highly complex and would otherwise become a performance issue for big(ger) Mahara sites. All the other 3 patches that are in review at the moment relate to Elasticsearch for which we are making progress and still need a bit of work. The old / existing reports won't require Elasticsearch. With Elasticsearch though, we can not only be more performant but also report over individual events better.

What you'll see right now when you get the code:

• Site and institution stats have been merged.
• Statistics are now called "Reports" as we also put the user reports into that section to be consistent.
• Additional reports can be added easily to the interface (the hard part is the SQL queries and getting them into Elasticsearch though once we have some examples, I suspect it will be more straight forward).
• You can report over time frames rather than only having a pre-defined one available.
• The new reports mentioned by you can be tested. Some of them will change in regard to the reporting time frame and use the event data once hooked up to Elasticsearch rather than the page creation date like right now.

We invite you to give it a go and test it now while it's still in development. You are welcome to create an account in the review system and post your comments directly or make changes. While Robert is the main developer of this piece, I added the language strings so people know what the report is going to display, and the review system supports such collaboration. Happy to answer questions about getting started with Gerrit, our review system, in an online session.

Cheers

Kristina

26 July 2017, 23:26

Hi Joost and Bas and thanks Kristina.

Yes, we are making great progress with the AAIM project and thanks to Catalyst for all their work on this. We hope to have more information to share with the community soon on the availability of the new reporting functionality. In the meantime, the project blog has been updated: https://wordpress.com/post/aaimproject.com/118

Cheers,

Lisa