Audience: Researchers (data czars)

Owner: Analytics team (/wiki/spaces/AN/overview)

Locationhttp://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/devdata/en/latest/

Source files: edx-documentation/en-us/data

ReadTheDocs project: devdata

Introduction

The EdX Research Guide "is intended for data czars, researchers, and administrative teams at edX partner institutions who use the edX data exports to gain insight into their courses and students." This guide covers information such as SQL tables and their columns, events and their member fields, and the Research Data Exchange (RDX).

The Analytics team tries to document every change to every SQL table and event that is included in the partner data package. The research guide does not currently document every possible table or event that is available to Open edX sites, only those that are included in partner data packages.

Creating Documentation

The process for creating or updating documentation in this guide is the process outlined on the Creating and Updating Documentation - RTD page.

The most commonly updated file is edx-documentation/en-us/data/source/internal_data_formats/event_list.rst.

For information about a specific set of events that you want to document, see the list on the /wiki/spaces/AN/pages/13959710 page.

A "History" note with the date of every change or addition allows researchers to understand why their data packages contain different information over time, and to construct queries that take those differences into account when, for example, comparing different runs of the same course.