OERu/Planning/MVP learning analytics project/Planning questions from Lunametrics

Note: The questions below were sent via personal email from Becky West at Lunametrics and have been posted here with permission for the benefit of the OERu Learning analytics group.

Next steps

In addition to continuing to refine your wiki page on tracking requirements (which looks great by the way), there are a few other steps that we can get started on:

Google analytics and Google Tag Manger Accounts

• Do you (Wiki Educator) already have a Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager Account? If so, we may want to consider adding the data for this project to those accounts. We can create a separate property (data collection location) within that account for this specific project while still keeping everything under your organization name. If you do not these accounts set up, we can go ahead and create these accounts for you. They are free to set up and we will give you full permissions. At the end of our project, we will remove the permissions for LunaMetrics and you will have full ownership of both accounts.
  1. The WikiEducator analytics account is associated with my personal gmail account and manager privileges shared with appropriate OERF staff. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
  2. No, we do not have a Google Tag Manager Account --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
  3. I am consulting with Dave Lane, our Lead Software Engineer as to whether the Foundation should set up a dedicated email account for the OERF / OERu project - rather than associated with our personal email accounts. Will need to check Google's terms of reference about Administrators allocating accounts - but from memory this should be OK. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
  4. Given the potential reach and scale of the OERu courses, it would seem better to have a dedicated account for both Analytics and Tag Manager. Of course we will assign manager rights to the Lunametrics team. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Demo course for development

• I think it would be easiest to start by adding tracking to one course that has all of the important functionality included (videos, quizes, etc). Then we can test the code on other courses to ensure that the tracking rules will generalize to all sites. Is http://course.oeru.org/ds4oer/course-guide/learning-challenges/ the best course to get started on?
  1. OERu courses are published on a Wordpress Multisite installation at course.oeru.org. Each course is an individual blog site. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
  2. I suggest that we set up a development blog site, eg course.oeru.org/analyticsdev with a representative sample of the pedagogical elements we are planning to track. The DS4OER course contains most of the elements we want to track - but not all. This week we will set up a development site. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Video tracking

• I know that watching videos is an important user interaction. It sounds like you have some other course activities (like quizzes) that it may be useful to track. Can you compile a list of these important/standard course activities along with a link to where we can find a typical example of this type of activity? Also, if there are multiple versions of an activity (for example, multiple types of video players or quizzes that are coded in different ways), it would be helpful to have a head's up. I want to make sure that our tracking is as robust as possible and will correctly track all of your courses.
  1. Yes there are a number of activity types including videos and quizzes that will be useful to track. I have created a sub-page for MVP activity types proposed for tracking which we will populate during the coming week under the Active tasks subheading on the main project page in the wiki. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Setting up accounts

After we create your Google Analytics / Google Tag Manager accounts, I will send you some instructions for adding Google Tag Manager to your wordpress site.

1. • Thanks. Dave Lane will be the best contact on our end to integrate the Tag managers plugin for the WordPress site. Do you know if their is plugin support for Multisite installations? We will need to think about solutions for aggregating data from multiple courses - assuming this is possible. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Setting up element ids and data-attributes

• As a head's up, once we get these initial steps out of the way, we will be sending you some instructions for adding some element ids, data-attributes, and other code to your site to help with the tracking. Based on our conversation in May, I am hoping this will not be a big problem for you. However, I do want this to be a collaborative project, so please let me know if certain things are difficult to add based on the way your back-end is structured. Alternatively, I would also love to hear about what data you have available that we can add to the tracking. (For example, I know we will be asking for the template information to be added to the page.) --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
  1. Open collaboration is how we roll at the OER Foundation :-). We request that all communications recorded transparently for all to see. In other words, if its not in the wiki or the email list - as far as we're concerned they don't exist ;-). --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
  2. Our back-end involves scripting a snapshot of a collection of wiki pages for a custom OERu Wordpress theme. We use Mediawiki templates for pedagogical elements, so we will be able to inject element ids and data-attributes via the script. However, the scripting for custom ids and elements will take some time to deploy on our end. However, we can hard-code these elements in the Wordpress site for testing and development purposes. Once we have figured out what is needed, we can then commence work on refining the snapshot script to automate this for all OERu courses. --Wayne Mackintosh, OER Foundation, New Zealand (talk) 04:16, 11 June 2016 (UTC)