Moodle Activities


Principal investigator and supervisor: Riccardo Mazza

Developer: Mauro Nidola (as part of his diploma degree at SUPSI)

Period: September - October, 2005

Motivation

Currently, many educational institutions and enterprises have set up Course Management Systems (CMS) and are organizing their courses and activities around these new technologies. The administrator of such a software platform faces some difficulties in monitoring the module’s usage in courses. In particular, if he want to understand to what extent a particular module (for instance, Forum) has been used in all the courses managed by the platform, we has to enter each specific course, and trying to make sense of the usage that has been done with the tool. Needless to say, a platform can run thousands of courses.

Description

This work proposes an approach to graphically represent the tracking data in Course Management Systems in order to mine and discover the usage of
specific software modules. We have implemented a tool that aim to give, at a glance, a visual representation of the usage of a specific module in all the
courses managed by the Course Management System. The tool allows also comparing the usage in different courses, and seeing the distribution of the usage during the time. This information is useful to administrators of the Course Management System that have to know how much the modules have been used in courses. But also, it could be useful to instructional designers that have to design, plan, and evaluate the learning needs in institutions.

Some graphical representations (click on these to have a larger image and a brief explanation):

main window forum chat

Publications (see publications page for pdf files)

Riccardo Mazza. A graphical tool for monitoring the usage of modules in Course Management Systems. In: IEEE EMBS Visual Information Expert Workshop Paris, France - Apr. 24-25, 2006.  To appear in April 2006.
 

<-- back