Hello all,
After hearing about the Purdue Signals Project at the 2013 Moodle Moot in Portland, I - along with one of my senior students at the time - began work on a simple project, Moodle Meter, that would:
- calculate each student's course activity*, relative to others in the course
- Assign each student to 1 of 5 levels - 1 being well below average, 3 being average, 5 being well above average.
- show each student their level, as an indication of how active they are on the course site relative to their classmates
- show the instructor a list of all of the students' levels, including the ability to graph the change in activity over time
*The calculation of a student's activity score is terribly simple, and essentially scores the Moodle logs for occurrences of certain types of activities, each class of activity is weighted in the block config. I feel like this is one of the weak points of our calculations.
I beta-tested this block with an opt-in group of faculty this spring,
and the feedback was positive. Most said that it simply reinforced their gut feeling, but it was good to have data to back it up.
I was hoping to get some general feedback from the developers on board as to what the overall weaknesses of this block are, and ways to improve it, if worthwhile.
The project, as it stands, is somewhat stable, but lacks testing code and externalization of strings (among other things, I'm sure) to bring it up to Moodle plugin standards.
Thanks for any and all comments,
Marty Gilbert