Forum Posts Analysis

This document records the primary workflow as developed in the Measuring qualification effects project, and later refactored in the Refining a framework project, to apply filtering criteria and to classify student forum posts.

Workflow

forum posts analysis workflow

Forum posts analysis workflow

The workflow begins with manually downloading the Moodle backup for a course.

mbz folder

Contains the downloaded Moodle backups. The folder name is taken from the file extension. The extension name is derived from Moodle Backup Zip. This folder is the default, but you can specify a different folder in the scripts as you can with any folder in the framework.

extract_forums script

Extracts all forums from the Moodle backup in their native XML format. Each forum has its own file.

forums folder

Contains the raw XML Moodle files of each student forum.

filter_posts script

Applies the four filtering criteria to the student posts, collating the selected posts into one html page for each forum for easy review, and a summary index page of all the for the course

reports folder

Contains all html files produced by the scripts.

classify_forum_posts script

Applies the selected classification scheme to the extracted forum files, producing one pkl file for each input forum XML file.

forums_posts_classified folder

Contains a pkl file for each forum, with the classification results for each post in that forum.

track_classified_posts script

Tracks the use of each level of a taxonomy through the duration of the course.

data folder

Contains all csv files produced by the scripts.

track_filtered_posts script

Tracks the use of external resources as defined by the filters through the duration of the course.

taxonomies folder

The classifiers are set using the standard workflow.

See prepare taxonomy documentation for more information.

Optional extensions

Filter false

filterfalse review workflow

To aid review of the filtering criteria as they were developed a filterfalse_posts script was written to present the excluded posts in the same easy to read manner as filter_posts presented the included posts.

Draw plots

draw plot workflow

To aid review of the data simple graphs were prepared. In practice, reviewing the data by loading it into Excel and plotting graphs there has proven better. The graphs can be easily scaled appropriately in Excel, and generally tweaked into a better looking format for use in project reports and dissemination activities.