AAT Export Utility

Local plugins ::: local_aatplugin

Maintained by

Joseph Larochelle,

Devin Arnold,

Richard Jacklin,

Rafiuddin Akhlaque,

Harshit Maheshwari,

Sabine Graf

The Academic Analytics Tool (AAT, https://www.academicanalytics.ca/) allows users without computer science skills (e.g., teachers, learning designers, etc.) to directly access and analyze the huge amounts of educational data stored within LMSs such as Moodle. This plugin allows instructors to export the data related to their courses, so it can be used within AAT.

Latest release: 5 months

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7 downloads

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Current versions available: 1

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Plugin description

This plugin allows users to export course and student interaction data from Moodle for use within the Academic Analytics Tool (AAT) available at www.academicanalytics.ca.

AAT facilitates users in accessing, exploring and analyzing Moodle data in order to get answers to almost limitless questions about learners' behavior and derive insights on the impact of teaching methods and learning designs.

A simple, wizard-based interface guides users through the process of selecting and filtering Moodle activities, resources, and related concepts without requiring knowledge of the underlying database schema or familiarity with a database query language such as SQL. As such, it is particularly well-suited to instructors, learning designers, researchers or other course administrators who may not have a background in database administration or data analysis, but are interested in exploring data related to courses they deliver, support, or administer.

More information on the tool is available at www.academicanalytics.ca

Plugin use

Once installed, the plugin allows users to extract information related to courses in which they have an instructional role, as well as user interaction data related to those courses. Users can extract data by:

1. Navigating to the AAT plugin link under the "More" tab of a course in which they are an instructor
2. Selecting the courses to download data from
3. Generating and downloading an encrypted data file (for import in to AAT)

Behind the scenes, the plugin operates in three steps:

1. Creates a database schema by combining all the install.xml files in the Moodle directory and uses this to recreate the structure of the Moodle database.
2. Analyzes the Moodle database structure and creates a list of tables that are related to the central "course" table. It is from this list of tables that data will be extracted.
3. Extracts data related to the course(s) selected by the users, which is encrypted before download. Note that the user can only download data from courses in which they are an instructor.

Potential privacy issues

This plugin does not generate or store any user data. However, it does allow users with the course overview reporting capability to generate a SQL dump file for all courses in which they have that capability. This file will contain the data related to those courses and users within those courses. Data from about 250 tables from the moodle database will be searched and relevant entries saved to an encrypted file.