YOU CAN HELP!

We want to make this page a great analytics starting point for the whole Open edX community! You can help by adding links to relevant content like past talks, slides, documents, videos. The guiding question is, "Would the information I want to post be helpful to someone who wants to learn more about analytics for Open edX?"

- Analytics Working Group organizers

Overview

This page serves as a starting point for understanding the analytics ecosystem for Open edX.

What are analytics?

Analytics could be defined by a process in which data is interpreted in a way, so to discover patterns useful to predict further trends of the data. A better definition can be found on Wikipedia as "discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data; and the process of applying those patterns towards effective decision-making". So analytics embeds a wide range of processes, tools and objectives relying on the context they are thought to be used for.

In the context of teaching and learning, analytics are used to retrieve information and pattern from learners' progress for a range of different end users (teacher, staff, management...). Retrieved information will then be used to either correct detected issues in the course, the set of courses or understand and support students who are failing. In our context we are also interested in "Analysis" of the data (see "Analysis vs Analytics: past vs. Future"), so we will blur both definition under the "Analytics" terms umbrella, although some tools and processes are more in tune with the definition of the Analysis process.

What is the Open edX Analytics Working Group?

The Analytics Working group had its start at the 2019 Open edX Conference Dev Summit in San Diego. The group is currently being formed. Two organizers have volunteered to lead the group, Laurent David and John Baldwin. A third edX as yet unchosen person will be the third volunteer/organizer.

What community communication channels are available?

For analytics specific topics, you can visit the Open edX #analytics slack channel

What analytics tools are available for Open edX?

Current Analytics Tools (from diverse sources, some of it is https://github.com/edx/edx-tools/wiki), we listed here tools that are in an Open Source License (MIT, AGPL or other)

Tool Name	Aims	Datasource	Status	Comments	References
edX Analytics	Collect information for staff/teachers to see student's demography/engagement/performance ...	Tracking logs Student data (MySQL) Course structure	Production	Plus: Most advanced analytics solution so far. Minus: Difficult to install.	https://github.com/edx/edx-analytics-pipeline : back-end pipeline, used to collate data from various sources https://github.com/edx/edx-analytics-data-api: API server used by the front-end to get collated information (either from the pipeline or ??) https://github.com/edx/edx-analytics-dashboard : Front-end for the Analytics dashboard See: https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-developer-guide/en/latest/analytics.html https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-insights/en/latest/
Front-end Analytics			??		https://github.com/edx/frontend-analytics
Analytics Exporter			??		https://github.com/edx/edx-analytics-exporter
edX Figures					https://github.com/appsembler/figures
MOOC Pilot					https://github.com/plantie/moocpilot
moocRP					https://github.com/kk415kk/moocRP
MOOCczar					https://github.com/UQ-UQx/MOOCczar
ANALYSE					https://github.com/analyseuc3m/ANALYSE-v1