First analysis

I'm still not sitting on a vast pile of data, but I've done my first bit on analysis on my log file data, and it mostly showed me what I was expecting. I had put the link to upload resources on a page that I thought was rarely visited. My analysis shows that this page is in fact visited 3% as often as the other page I could have put the upload link on.

Compass, the Curriculum Management System/Virtual Learning Environment that I'm adding these social tools into, is built around two main objects: the Teaching Activity and the Learning Objective. It is a searchable database of those two things, and the linkages between them - around 2,000 of each are in the database. It also holds learning resources, provided by the teachers, which are linked to the Teaching Activities. Part of the idea behind my project was to add prominence to the Learning Objectives, by linking the student resources to them.

The problem was that I did the logical thing, by adding the "upload resource" button onto the Learning Objective pages. The students currently have no need to visit these pages, since the key parts of the Learning Objectives are displayed on the page of the Teaching Activities they are linked to. The predictable result was that almost no students discovered the Add Resource button. In fact, it was predictable enough that I pointed it out as the second requirement for a successful social network for learning in my first post on this blog. Oops.

I've now finished most of the coding to add the tools onto a range of more high-profile web pages within Compass. The coming weeks will show whether that makes any difference. In the longer term, I'll be adding even higher profile links, such as an Activity Stream of the latest uploaded resources on the portal page for the web site. I'm expecting each new tool will add to the amount of utilization my network receives.