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.