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.
Forum posts analysis workflow
The workflow begins with manually downloading the Moodle backup for a course.
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.
Extracts all forums from the Moodle backup in their native XML format. Each forum has its own file.
Contains the raw XML Moodle files of each student forum.
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
Contains all html
files produced by the scripts.
Applies the selected classification scheme to the extracted forum files, producing one pkl
file for each input forum XML file.
Contains a pkl
file for each forum, with the classification results for each post in that forum.
Tracks the use of each level of a taxonomy through the duration of the course.
Contains all csv
files produced by the scripts.
Tracks the use of external resources as defined by the filters through the duration of the course.
The classifiers are set using the standard workflow.
See prepare taxonomy documentation for more information.
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.
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.