Sharing opinions and findings on Moodle Discussion Forums is a common class activity. Often we would like to know how frequent students contribute to the discussion, especially when the discussion is related to group work. The Discussion Forum Participation is a Moodle plug-in that addresses this need by providing a graphical representation of students’ contributions over time. These graphs, furthermore, enable students to compare their level of contribution to the class average and the average of their group, thus providing motivation to participate in the discussion. The IntelliBoard reports are another suite of reports that provide teachers with a larger overview of students’ activities in various courses, such as summarising the number of visits to different Moodle activities and identifying inactive students.

In addition to showing you how to use these tools, this workshop will have Dr Winnie Lam of MIT to share with us how she has been using the Discussion Forum Participation in her courses to monitor and encourage students to work in groups.

Reading is a common part of our courses, but often we have little information about how students read, e.g., how much time they spend on different pages, which parts they have more questions. BookRoll is a learning analytics tool that aims at tackling these needs: BookRoll provides an interface for students to read articles uploaded by teachers while allowing them to add notes and highlight texts of their choice. Students’ reading activities will then be summarised in a dashboard for further scrutiny by teachers.

In addition to showing you how to use BookRoll, this workshop will have Mr Adam Bong of SSC to share with us how he has used BookRoll to monitor reading activities in his courses and to compare students’ behaviour under different settings.

To ensure students are on track with their courses, teachers often would like to have a better idea about how students make use of resources on Moodle. Behaviour Analtyics is a Moodle plug-in that addresses this need: by displaying various Moodle resources as a network of nodes, Behaviour Analytics shows the sequence in which students access these resources. Its clustering function can also suggest to us students who demonstrate similar access patterns on Moodle.

 In addition to showing you how to use Behaviour Analytics, this workshop will have Dr Sophia Lam of CHL to share with us how she has used this tool to visualise access patterns of students and how they correlate with cognitive engagement.