Our research group has developed a concept for tracking student literacy, which includes assessing reading and writing fluency. Instead of test items, it passively captures student literacy behaviors. We would like to develop a Moodle module, which would be primarily used by elementary school teachers. Can anyone please advise us how to proceed?
This sounds like a great project. What kinds of writing sources are you hoping to have this tool analyze? For example, will the students be discussing topics in forums? Or would this tool primarily be used for submitted assignments?
The easiest way to implement this as a Moodle plugin would probably be as a quiz question type, similar to other automatically graded question types, but I don't know if that's what you have in mind, in terms of "passively capturing student literacy behaviors." Another option would be to implement it as a new activity type, e.g. a variation on a student journal activity. In either of these cases, the plugin could produce learning analytics indicators that could be used in models to predict outcomes, if that is your goal.
Thanks for your ideas.
Ideally, we'd like to capture students' literacy behaviors from their activity in forums and reading assignments. No quizzes or tests. For reading, we'd need to impose some kind of moving window. For writing, we'd need to capture keystrokes. We don't know whether this is possible in Moodle.
Perhaps someone with Moodle programming experience would know how this could be done.