Moodle in English

Greetings fellow Moodlers,

The Behaviour Analytics block plugin (https://moodle.org/plugins/block_behaviour) has recently been released in the Moodle plugin directory. This plugin provides teachers with a visualization of their students' learning behaviour patterns. Learning modules from a course are used as nodes in a network graph, which can be arbitrarily positioned. Student accesses to the modules create links between the nodes and become the students' behaviour pattern. It is possible to compare the learning patterns of students to see their similarities and differences for various time slices.

The plugin also allows students to be clustered according to their behaviour patterns. Each student has a unique pattern that is compressed to a single point, then these student centroid points can be clustered to group students. Clusters of students may have common learning behaviours that can be viewed by hovering over a cluster centroid. It is also possible to annotate the students and clusters during the clustering stage.

Currently, the VIP Research Group at Athabasca University (https://vipresearchgroup.ca/) are also developing the LORD (learning Object Relation Discovery) Moodle plugin. The LORD plugin uses WordNet and Natural Language Processing to measure the similarity between two learning objects (activity modules). The similarities are used to automatically position the Learning Object Graph (LOG) nodes, rather than using manual positioning. Presently, only the English language is supported, but there are plans to support French and Hindi next year (2021).

The LORD plugin has not yet been released to the Moodle plugin directory, but is available on GitHub (https://github.com/Behaviour-Analytics/moodle-block_lord). There is also a new version of Behaviour Analytics plugin available (https://studyguide.athabascau.ca/networkgraph/download.php) that is designed to integrate with LORD. Both LORD and the new Behaviour Analytics will get submitted to the Moodle plugin directory later this year.