I’m making a list of free / inexpensive tools for gathering data in open education contexts. These are tools that I can install on the wikis, blogs, and other sites I maintain where I curate and structure content for my students. Unfortunately, my list is rather short… What tools are you using to gather data from your online courses that I’m missing?
For example, is there something you use to track which outgoing links people are clicking on? A tool you use to associate repeat visits and activity with the same individual (anonymously)? What kind of data are you collecting from your OER? How are you using it to improve your students’ experience? To improve your teaching? Are they plugins for WordPress or Mediawiki or some other platform? Are they “one line embeds” like the tools listed above? What tools do we need the most that don’t exist yet?
For the next two or three years, I think the intersection between openness and data mining / analytics may be the single most interesting space in our field…
How about Analog on Apache in Debian? It may not have all the features of those “free” packages, but it’s truly “open.”
We’re planning to use Piwik on a faculty resource sharing project — it plugs in nicely to WordPress MU
Mike beat me to it, but piwik is very nice – open source and all “web 2.0-ey”.
An additional tool looking at student interactions with LMS discussion forums – SNAPP
http://research.uow.edu.au/learningnetworks/seeing/snapp/index.html
I think we should add some tools to analyze the impact of resources on social networks: StatsMix (http://www.statsmix.com) or similar.
Thanks for sharing those tools.
You can actually track clicks on outgoing links with Google Analytics — see http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527
For event tracking, Google Analytics does a pretty good job as well — http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/event-tracking-best-practices.html
I’ve also been experimenting with two newish tools that I like very much, kissmetrics and mixpanel.
http://kissmetrics.com
http://mixpanel.com/
Really very useful tools that you have shared here… Thanks