ANALYSIS OF DISTANCE ED COURSE WITH WEB ANALYTICS

One of the things I found most difficult in analyzing raw web statistics with this course (and it seems that I would find this frustrating with any similar project) was that I felt like I was doing some guesswork without having spoken to the client.

There are no goals set (perhaps that's part of the end assignment), and there is really no way for me personally to know what the client would like to see happening. Do they want more course evaluations? Would they like to know how many people finished the course? Do they care that people don't spend much time on any given page? These are all questions that could easily be answered and filtered through a couple of sit-downs.

My assumptions, along with the data I looked at, led me to these observations and recommendations:

• Of a total of about 4,300 page views of the first page of the first lesson (I have no access to actual enrollment data), only 15 or 16 visits were made to the course evaluation page. Again, not knowing how many actual course evaluations were submitted, this would reflect at most 15 or 16 course evaluations, or an evaluation rate of 0.37%. I don't know what Independent Study's intentions are for course evaluation, but this seems to be to be a very, very low number. My recommendation would be to integrate the course evaluation better into the course. It could be placed more strategically, perhaps, to give more attention or incentive to the student to complete the evaluation.
• Looking only at the past month, even the few evaluations that were visited (not necessarily completed) have quite a bit of variance. One student spent almost four minutes on the evaluation page, while two others spent 26 and 42 seconds--hardly enough time to fill out an honest or thought-out evaluation. It might be interesting to see if there was more than one evaluation submitted, and to be able to tie that evaluation to the time spent. My guess would be that if a student completed the evaluation in around 30 seconds, it's probably safe to throw that evaluation out. A recommendation could be to modify or take a new approach to the course evaluation so as to be both more effective and more inviting to complete. Maybe you could even scatter evaluation questions throughout the course?
  
• As an overall recommendation, the analytics for Math 110 needs filters and especially limited access. I can access any page on the course, which doesn't seem like it would help accuracy in determining which pageviews are from students/nonstudents. And any visits from students (such as those from our class) would cloud the undermine the integrity of the data.
  

Overall, I think I have more questions than I have recommendations or answers. I imagine we'll revisit this course.

HELLO, MY NAME IS _______

I've been planning on getting this blog up and going for some time, but two of my classes in my graduate program this semester provided me some extra incentive to finally get it together.

One of the assignments mirrored in both classes is to introduce myself and explain some of my reasons for taking my two classes: "New Media, Social Media, & Learning," and "Web Analytics."

Me in a nutshell: I'm from a small town in northern Nevada called Elko. I've been living in Utah for the past six years or so, and after spending two years in Brazil on an LDS mission, studied Portuguese and graduated with a degree of the same name from Brigham Young University in Provo. I got a job just before I was married in 2004 editing online high school indepenedent study courses. I got so interested in web technology, specifically rich web media, I began teaching myself web programming languages. This continued until I obtained my first full time job as a multimedia developer for the LDS Church (headquartered in Salt Lake City).

After two years at the Church, I left with a friend of mine to pursue ventures with some outside clients that had grown to a considerable size. We quickly grew to a company of four employees, and currently have five employees in our small internet publishing and multimedia firm called Sharp Media Interactive Development.

I am married to the most beautiful girl in the world, Kim. We have two children: Emmy (2) and Cohen (3 months). We currently live in Pleasant Grove.

As for the classes, I quite literally almost didn't take any classes this semester. With work being as busy as it is, I took the summer off and almost did the same in the Fall. The titles of both of these classes were too good to pass up. With Web Analytics, I heard a lecture from my professor, Clint Rogers, last year about the class topic and was really excited about it. Analytics are not a huge part of what we do, but I love the applications and implications of it and I'm ready to learn more.

As for New Media, I am really exicted about learning and sharing about the technology that is my work and my passion (if you can't already tell).

Here's to a fruitful semester (that doesn't kill me).