This release sees the addition of 3 more options for configuring the use of the word and sentence similarity calculator and compatibility with Moodle 4.1

Learning Object Relation Discovery (LORD)

This plugin determines the similarity between all the learning activities in a course and uses the similarity to configure a network graph of the activities.

This plugin extracts all the text content from the various learning objects in a course and uses that content to determine a similarity measure between each activity and every other activity. The similarity value comes from a Web service that takes 2 sentences and compares them, returning a similarity measure, which is then used as a link distance between the activity nodes in a network graph. The different distances combined with the graphing physics simulation produce a unique configuration of nodes. This plugin acts as a stand alone program, but is designed to be used with the Behaviour Analytics block, where the nodes in the graph are manually configured. This program is designed to replace the manual configuration process with an automated one.

Setting up the plugin

The LORD plugin installs like any other plugin. It makes use of a scheduled task to do background processing, which compares the various learning activities in the course. The frequency of the comparisons can be adjusted by from Site administration -> Server -> Scheduled tasks. By default, the task is set to run every 5 minutes and will make a single comparison between learning activities for each course that the plugin is installed in. No comparisons will be made, however, until the discovery process is turned on both globally and locally in the course in which the block is installed. To turn on the discovery process globally, navigate to Site administration -> Plugins -> Plugins overview -> Settings (for LORD). The discovery process can be turned on locally from the Settings link in the block.

How to use the plugin

This plugin is simple to use. The block shown on the course page contains a link to the graphing page, a progress chart, and a link to settings. The progress chart will show how many activity connections have been compared, which is a lengthy process. The Web service takes time to compare the content from the different activities, so the process is run in the background. Depending on the number of learning activities in the course and the frequency of the scheduled task, the process could take from hours to weeks. The progress chart will show what has been done to date.

Once all activity connections have been compared, the graph can be viewed by clicking the associated link. If there are missing values, the graph does not configure properly. The first time the graphing page is viewed, a new graph is generated, which is the system graph. Clicking and dragging the graph nodes will also rearrange the configuration and produce a custom graph. The graphing interface has a button to switch between the custom and system graphs. There are also 3 sliders that control the distance parameters for graph generation and another button to regenerate the system graph.

When viewing the graph, left-clicking a node will show the learning content for the associated learning object. Right-clicking another node will show the content for both nodes as well as the similarity value between them. Beneath the similarity value and content are a number of matrices showing the similarity values between words in the sentences, sentences in the paragraphs, and paragraphs in the content. All these similarities combine to form the final similarity value.

There is a settings page that contains various options for the plugin. The first is a checkbox to start or resume the discovery process. No comparisons between learning objects will be made unless the plugin is configured to do so. There are also options to control the maximum number of sentences and paragraphs compared between learning objects and the maximum number of words to allow in a sentence. There are also adjustable weights for use in the final similarity value calculation, where the names, the introductions, and the rest of the module content can be weighted differently. There are 4 options to configure the use of the word and sentence similarity calculator. There are 3 reset options, one to reset just the comparison errors, one to reset all comparisons, and the other to reset both comparisons and module content. Finally, there is an option to add or remove stop words from the dictionary.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.