TOPIC:

Hi Xerte Community.

We've been running Xerte servers for many years. About 6 years ago I helped migrate several instances onto one centrally managed Xerte server.

We have now reached a point where we want to gain a deeper understanding of how Xerte resources are used. For example, we have some content which we know is authored by users who are no longer staff or students at the university but may still be being actively used in teaching, which we obviously would want to assign to an active user as co-author rather than delete.

Generally speaking it would be helpful to know a bit more beyond total views.

So, my question is what options do we have to generate these kinds of analytics/statistics at an institutional level? Any suggestions from the community would be appreciated.

Thanks!

We have google analytics on our Xerte installation which adds a bit of detail but you're still limited to the number of page views. For example, we were able to see our top resources, but the page views include a lot of 'testing' views and there's no breakdown around staff/student use. We could see the difference between new and returning users (although again, not sure how accurate this is, say if someone visits from different devices?).

We're now trying in earnest to get the xAPI dashboard set up so that we can get more details about the actual usage within projects. This should help tutors understand how their resurces are being used, and then can adapt them more effectively. I'm not sure if there will also be benefits at the 'admin' level but I'll let you know! We're setting up a Learning Record Store (open source) which will be connected to our Xerte instance (we're testing it with version 3.11 which we want to update to).

Yvonne

Hi
a few quick comments...

regarding authors who have left - you don't need to share co-author access you can transfer ownership to a different user either per project or all projects via management. Any public, LTI and/or xAPI links with those projects still work and it's just as though that new owner created the project in the first place.

regarding total views - that was always meant as a very simple 'click count' for the author to get an overview of their public projects. It's just an incremental counter with no additional tracking. As Yyvonne has said some organisations use Google Analytics to get more detailed stats by adding GA code to each resource. Ultimately though if you want tracking of interactions and learning progress of individuals and/or groups then using SCORM or LTI + xAPI is where the 'power' lies.

regarding maintenance of installations - there is also another area of tracking or rather maintenance and reporting that you server admin should do in terms of storage, error reporting, upgrades, user usage and support etc and unfortunately we don't see too much evidence of this apart from the installations that we directly help maintain.

HTH
Ron