Checking community interest in lightweight analytics for Open edX

[John Baldwin]

Hi Everyone,

Appsembler has been working on a project that we're planning to release to the whole community that provides lightweight analytics as a pluggable app (reusable Django app) in the LMS. This is intended to be used by folks who are running their own Open edX instances and want to have site-wide and cross-course reporting data without requiring installing their own instance of Insights/edx-analytics. We're working on an OEP PR so that we can get feedback from the community as we work to release it.

We're also working to make as few changes to edx-platform itself as we can to enable this app, which would be enabled/disabled through settings in the lms.env.json file.

Here is a link to the Opencraft ed Xchange discussion with the conversation and more detail on what we are building:

https://edxchange.opencraft.com/t/analytics-lighter-faster-cheaper/202

Would be great to get feedback on the discussion page above (to help consolidate feedback)

Thanks!

-John

John Baldwin

Software Engineer, Appsembler

https://appsembler.com/

[Pierre Mailhot]

Hi John,

Saw the discussion yesterday.

We would definitely be interested in looking at it and testing it here at EDUlib.

Will it be released before or after the Open edX Conference?

[John Baldwin]

Hi Pierre,

Our plan is to "release early and release often" We're targeting an initial release for early April and continue development to meet both customer needs and incorporate improvements via community participation. So yes, we plan to release before the Open edX conference. 

-John

[John Mark]

This sounds great. How can we help you? Specifically, I want to help developers of additional features and their users collaborate on things like this. So, from a web infrastructure PoV, what could we do to facilitate this? To give you an idea, I've put together sites like this one in the past:

https://depot.manageiq.org/

Would that be of interest? That would be more long-term, but it's something I'd like to start planning for.

-JM

On Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 11:41:37 AM UTC-5, John Baldwin wrote:

[John Baldwin]

Hi John,

Thanks for your offer to help! We're carrying on the conversation here: https://edxchange.opencraft.com/t/analytics-lighter-faster-cheaper/202/9

in that forum, I inquired on testing strategies, in particular with dependencies on components within edx-platform. Jeremy Bowman replied with some info and tips

-John

[John Baldwin]

Hi Everyone,

We have a somewhat brief architecture and design document for the lightweight analytics app we're developing:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16orj6Ag1R158-J-zSBfiY31RKQ5FuSu1O5F-zpSKOg4/

I had originally posted this on ed Xchange: https://edxchange.opencraft.com/t/analytics-lighter-faster-cheaper/202 and was reminded that it would be good to post in the google groups too.

The document is open for commenting, so please feel free to comment, ask questions, point out gross errors in logic ;)

Thanks!

-John

On Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 11:41:37 AM UTC-5, John Baldwin wrote: