Student projects/Animated grade statistics report

Note: This page outlines ideas for the Animated grade statistics report project. It's a specification under construction! If you have any comments or suggestions, please add them to the page comments.

Original Idea Summary

Use the Flare library to develop some cool and useful visualisation of information in the Moodle gradebook. This can be designed as a Grade Report plugin (grade/report/visual) for Moodle 1.9. To be really flexible and extensible, this should be built in several modular parts: harvesters to collect information (e.g., "grade entered"), reporters to summarize and normalize information, and adapters to feed that information into different visualization engines (so that if anyone ever wants to replace Flare, or if Flare changes, damage will be localized).

Student: Daniel Servos

Mentors: Greg Wilson, Anthony Borrow and Nicolas Connault

Status

• Developing Specs

Core Functions

• Developed as a grade report plugin for Moodle 2.0 and then back ported to 1.9.X
• Provide additional statistics about grades:
  • Highest
  • Lowest
  • Average
  • Median
  • Mode
  • Standard Deviation
• Have report viewable or not by roll in class (required roll to view set by teacher.)
  • Possibly have advanced setting to set each statistic or graphic viewable by roll in class.
• Visualisation of statistics and grades in graphs and charts using flare.
  • Option to turn use of flare on/off (thus turning off visualisations) for browsers with out flash or slow connections.
• Statistic for both incomplete and complete assignments included in calculations or option to determine how incomplete assignments are treated.
• Ability to export statistics.
• Some level of customization for statistics and graphs in report.

Capabilities

gradereport/stats:view

Capability to see the stats report.

gradereport/visual:view

Capability to see the visual report.

Database Structures

Rows to be added

Rows to be added to existing tables:

• capabilities - Add row for gradereport/stats:view capability
• capabilities - Add row for gradereport/visual:view capability
• role_capabilities - Add rows for gradereport/stats:view role capability
• role_capabilities - Add rows for gradereport/visual:view role capability

Interface Mockups

grade/report/stats

Tasks and Timeline

• Develop and finalize specifications. - By May 26th.
• Create basic gradebook report plugin (grade/report/stats) for displaying text based statistics. - By Mid/Early June.
  • Make harvesters to collect raw data needed for statistics.
  • Make reporters to summarize and normalize information for statistics.
  • Add options to control viewing of stats by roll in class.
  • Add customization options.
• Create gradebook report plugin (grade/report/visual) for displaying charts and graphs using flare. - By Mid July
  • Make adapters to interface with flare.
  • Make the visualizations using flare.
  • Add options to control viewing of stats by roll in class.
  • Add customization options.
• Add export functionality of reports to other document types. - By August.
• Testing and debugging. - By August.
• Back port plugin to moodle 1.9.X. - By August 11th.
  • Testing and debugging for plugin for 1.9.X.
• Scrub code, final tests, improve documentation. - By August 18th.

Glossary

Term	Definition
Visualization	A graph, chart or other visual representation of grade data or statistics created using flare.
Flare	A collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations on the web.
Harvesters	Part of the code that deals with collecting raw data needed by the reporters to create statistics for the report.
Reporters	Part of the code that deals with taking the raw data from the harvesters and creating statistics needed for the report.
Adapters	Part of the code that deals with taking the raw data and statistics from the harvesters and reporters and interfacing with flare to create visualisations of the data/statistics.

See also

• GSOC/2008
• Animated grade statistics report application abstract
• Tracker issue realted to project
• Flare library