Graphic Visualizations of Student Performance in The Moodle Course Management System

1
Graphic Visualizations of Student Performance in
The Moodle Course Management System

• Justin Gawrilow
• Will Humphries
• with help from Jim Ladd

2
Problem / Goals

• Moodle grade data traditionally displayed in
  tables
• Graphs allow more efficient interpretation of
  data while providing sufficient levels of clarity
• Goal use visualizations of current grades to
  help students make decisions/assessments of their
  performance

3
Critical User Tasks

• What did I get? determining grade
• Scenarios used to determine critical
  decisions/tasks
• Performance relative to other students
• Perfect scores/missed assignments
• Adequacy of effort thus far
• Impact of assignments on overall grade

4
Graph Design / Evaluation

• Survey
• Formative evaluation
• Different graphs have different strengths
• This determined which graphs were included, and
  where they were located

5
Demo
6
System Design

• PHP, MySQL, PHPLOT, GD
• Averages Count 0s?
• Gigantic multidimensional arrays ?
• Modularized code

7
Evaluation

• Quantitative Are the graphs being viewed?
  Compare students with similar overall GPAs to
  one another based on graph usage.
• Higher graph usage ?
• Qualitative Surveys, lab sessions
• Are the graphs understandable? Enjoyable? Is the
  interface to access them comfortable?

8
Novel Contributions

• Identified critical student decisions regarding
  grades, class performance
• Developed visualizations best suited to assist
  with these decisions
• Implemented visualizations
• Code is modularized could be used in other
  systems, other graphs could be added

9
Future Work

• Projection Graph
• Configuration (0s Count)
• Color Schemes
• Instructor Graphs
• More efficient data retrieval