Google recently (1st October 2013) announced improved segmentation in Google Analytics using age, gender and interests
It been interesting to read some of Tony Hirst’s posts on the use of Google Analytics within education. The thread goes back to 2008 with Library Analytics but most recently Tony has writing about this in an open course context such as MOOC Platforms and the A/B Testing of Course Materials and MOOC Busting: Personal Googalytics… which looks at the idea of collecting and feeding back performance data to users from across platforms.
When Daphne Koller was on the early Coursera push one of the aspects that caught my eye was using student generated data (aka their answers to questions) to in course design, in particular, to identify misconceptions or incorrectly set questions. To see what I mean here’s a cued clip from a presentation Koller gave at the Centre for Distance Education back in 2012.
Merging the two lines of thought I wondered if there was a way you could use Google Analytics to create a similar feedback mechanism. My starting point was Google Analytics Event tracking. From the Event Tracking documentation:
Event Tracking is a method available in the
ga.jstracking code that you can use to record user interaction with website elements, such as a Flash-driven menu system. This is accomplished by attaching the method call to the particular UI element you want to track. When used this way, all user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Events in the Analytics reporting interface. Additionally, pageview calculations are unaffected by user activity tracked using the Event Tracking method. Finally, Event Tracking employs an object-oriented model that you can use to collect and classify different types of interaction with your web page objects.
- Any Flash-driven element, like a Flash website, or a Flash Movie player
- Embedded AJAX page elements
- Page gadgets
- File downloads
- Load times for data
- category (required) – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
- action (required) – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
- label (optional) – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
- value (optional) – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.
- non-interaction (optional) – A boolean that when set to
true, indicates that the event hit will not be used in bounce-rate calculation.
So we can capture events and have some control over how they are described. What might we want to catch? Lets start by looking at was multiple choice questions (MCQs). Looking at the anatomy of an event this is one way we might want to encode it:
- category: ‘MCQ’
- action: ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
- label: a question identifier. This needs to be unique and might be something like coursecode_module_section_question (having a consistently structured label will help filter the data later)
- value: this is optional but as it needs to be an integer this restricts you a bit. You may want to use time taken to respond, confidence based mark etc.
I should say before you get carried away with tracking that:
The first 10 event hits sent to Google Analytics are tracked immediately, thereafter tracking is rate limited to one event hit per second.
To see how this works I’ve created this example page with a simple MCQ. This is a ‘live’ example with some crude code to push events to my Google Analytics account. You’ll notice on the page a response graph generated from the GA data. I’ll explain how that was made later.
The fist thing to note is that we can now see responses in real-time via the Google Analytics admin interface. The interface is not really geared for MCQs and there is a complication of who has access to the Analytics dashboard, but given that there is a Real Time Reporting API in beta a custom slice’n’dice should be possible in the future (I’ve got beta access so this might be one I revisit if/when Events get added to the API).
Similarly the Content Events report gives us access to historic data but again it has accessibility issues in terms of who has access to the Google Analytics account. On the plus side tweaking the display from the default ‘data’ view to ‘performance’ gives a basic bar chart which is more intuitive for this type of data.
Default data view for Content > Events
Performance data view for Content > Events
Segmentation and cohort analysis
There are some other built-in Google Analytics features that may also support analysis of the data including filtering:
or switching from a ‘line chart’ to a ‘motion chart’ (there are limits on what can be used for x-y values so some experimentation is required) and adding event reports to custom dashboards which may pull in other GA data.
This is where is potentially get even more interesting as the new Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation* allows you to do cohort analysis. The built-in segments are perhaps not relevant for this scenario but the custom options have lots of potential. Google provide 6 segment templates for ‘Demographics’, ‘Technology’, ‘Behavior’, ‘Data of First Visit’, ‘Traffic Sources’ and ‘E-commerce’ but it is easy for you to add custom conditions and sequences for segmentation.
*I’m not sure if Google are still following this out but noticed the new UI and segmentation options were only available in my Google Apps GA account, my standard @gmail account not having this option.
Examples of conditions/sequences you might want to explore include combining Tony’s suggestion of using Analytics A/B testing with event tracking e.g. identifying any correlation with content to performance or if someone visiting page x did they perform better in the test. It is also worth noting that:
Previously, advanced segments were based on visits. With the new segment, a new option is provided to create user segment. In a user segment, all visits of the users who fit the segment criterias will be selected (such as specific demographics or behaviors). It will be a useful technique when you need to perform user level analysis.
This is particularly useful as “Google Analytics customers are prohibited from sending personal information to Google.” [ref]. So while named individual level analysis isn’t possible you can get down to a user level.
On a practical level whilst these options potentially open some interesting avenues for exploration Google Analytics account administration is still not easy. Whilst this area has been recently improved the granularity of permissions is very course, an all or nothing approach. There is a growing list of tools/add-ins that integrate with Google Analytics which let you create custom workflows for data distribution. This is an area Google appear to be working on recently announcing the Google Analytics superProxy which is a web application that runs on Google App Engine to allow the distribution of GA data. This uses the Google Analytics Reporting APIs to define data queries and generate data files. Along similar lines (and announced before Google) I’ve published a similar solution that works in Google Drive (Using Google Spreadsheets as a Google Analytics Data Bridge). Below is an example query I using the the MCQ example at the beginning of the post. It’s currently using a very specific filter to exctract the data for all the event labels beginning
EMD101_Mod1_1.1_Q1_, but if using a standardise labeling you could include results for the entire module or course. I’m also not using an segment filters. As well as using standard segments you can also use custom segments
As I outlined in my original post there is a number of ways that these slices of Google Analytics data can be shared or consumed into other tools. In the example above the data is written (and refreshed every hour) to the sheet below, Google Sheets providing a convenient environment for sharing and querying data with the relative familiarity of a spreadsheet interface.
At this point I’d imagine some of you are wondering why go through all of this bother when your VLE is able to do similar, if not better, levels of reporting. My eye is primarily on the open education context where the institutional VLE is usually not and option. It also potentially provides a more holistic data source where you can experiment with content and resources across your little oasis (like ocTEL).
So what do you think? Will you be event tracking your MCQs?