Data Mining User Activity in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)/ Open Learning Management Systems

Background

As more teaching, research, and administrative processes are moved online, there arise both needs and opportunities for tracking, analyzing, and improving the online institutional systems involved. Important to the success of these online environments, for instance, is meeting increasing demands to document educational outcomes. Even as the distance between students, faculty, and administrators decreases online, demands for more detailed and rigorous accounting of teaching activities, curricular progress, and learning outcomes are increasing. Before the advent of large cross-institutional open source projects, e-learning tracking and reporting functionality was typically provided by software vendors. An educational technology group at a college or university could confine its efforts to meeting the mandates and needs of the local institution by using the reporting features of the commercial systems. In the case of open source applications, are often left to consider how information should be captured and managed, how to ensure that these requirements are ever included in the development process, or how to address these needs in other ways (e.g., data mining) when they’re not.