Abelardo PardoAbelardo Pardo, Carlos Delgado Kloos, Carlos Delgado KloosUniversity Carlos III of Madrid, SpainUniversity Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Stepping out of the box Toward analytics outside the LMS

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2Abelardo Pardo. Stepping out of the Box. Analytics outside the LMS

Warning: From macro to micro

Apply analytics to everyday operations

in a course.

Toward highly focused quick

actuators

!Micro doesnotmean simple

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The scenario• Second year engineering• Class meets twice a week• Active learning (U work, I

work)1.Learn how to program in C

2.Use “industrial” tools

3.Work in teams

4.Increase your self-learning

• Work in pairs and in teams• Significant out-of-class activity

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The problem

• LMS = Forum

• Intense activity outside LMS.

• Can we record the interaction?

• Can we take measures?

• Can we act over 250 students?

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The solution

• Think as a student

• Offer fully configured environment for the course

• Offer doc. sharing

• Attract course activity to that environment

• Capture, report, predict, act and refine

• Total transparency!

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Virtual Machines• A (guest) computer in a

file (8 Gigabytes)• Runs as a regular

application in your (host) PC

• When in full window, almost as running another operating system

• Access to files in “host” machine

• Available 1st day

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Internals

• Instrumentation of main tools

• Record when tools are used

• Relay data to server when updating shared documents

• Transparent to the user• User confirms terms of use

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Advantages• Closer insight on

procedural activities• Limited to the course

environment• Limited in time• Observe some

“elusive” behavior– Ability to use modern

engineering tools– Ability to function in

multidisciplinary teams

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On-going work

• First data set collected: Sep./Dic. 10. Observed 248 Students

• Used by 85% of them

• Encoded in CAM

• 48K events

• Beginning to report, towards “act”

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Browsing outside the LMS

• 48K events: 15,5K are URLs (32.07%)

• 8,669 unique pages

• 28.51% point to the LMS

• Conclusion: 3 out of 4 pages are outside the LMS.

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Conclusions

• VMs offer a good trade-off for course environment

• Advantages to students

• Potential for high observability

• Oriented toward quick actuators

www.it.uc3m.es/abelTwitter: @abelardopardo