Trecx and Moodle

Consider this scenario: an institution is running several Moodles. As part of a course, a student will need to 'do e-learning stuff' in each of these Moodles. Maybe there is one Moodle per course or something! A tutor would like to see a coherent report on the student's activity without having to enter each Moodle separately, generate a series of separate reports, and then manually collate all the tracking data.

Trecx should be able to help here, however, the caveat is that the toolkit is written in Java and of course moodle is PHP. That is not to say that Trecx cannot be useful, it's just that the ‘helper’ software will not be of any use. The tracking store and reporting application will still be useful though.

What the Moodle administrator will have to do is implement the ‘search interface’ so that it retrieves data from the moodles. A configuration file should be created which tells the Trecx reporting application the URLs of all the moodles and the reporting app will then query each moodle and collate the separate tracking data into a coherent whole.

More information can be found in the Trecx
wiki, specifically look at the DesignIssues and FunctionalRequirements pages.

You may find my and Alexis’ blogs useful (link at bottom of wiki front page).

As happens with these things, we are atrociously behind where wed hoped – this is mainly due to me missing 4 weeks of work near the start of the project (leg operation) and then taking my eye off the ball for 3 more weeks whilst trying to catch up with my other tasks! And then everything takes longer than hoped!

So what we will end up with is a toolkit but no demonstrators: we had hoped to demonstrate the software working with Bodington VLE and a forum (MVNForum). We should have been able to track a user as they followed links in the VLE and then ended up in the forum where they posted some messages. The reporting application will show where this user has been.

What we’re actually going to end up with (fingers crossed) is a demo which uses an application to simulate a student ‘doing e-learning stuff’ – this application will send its tracking data to a tracking store. We will do this 2 or 3 times and use 2 or 3 tracking stores. This will give us 2 or 3 ‘systems’ containing tracking data (each equivalent to your one of moodles) – the reporting app will then query these 2 or 3 tracking stores and collate the data and present it back as a chronologically ordered ‘audit trail. That’s the theory any way!

What would be a useful exercise for a Moodle expert is to look at what events we are thinking that an e-learning app will generate (see wiki) and see if Moodle does indeed store any of this info. If it does not then think if one can add code to moodle to get it to send ‘events’ to the Trecx tracking store. One should also consider the search interface we propose and think whether implementing it for moodle is a possibility.