Tony Hirst from the Open University gave an interesting presentation entitled ‘Course Analytics’ in the afternoon session of this first day of the Online Information Conference 2008.

As a lecturer he gets no feedback as to how his online course materials are used.  Normal web site analytics would be OK for the basic OU site which is essentially a sales site for courses.  Traditional analysis tools track activity, what users download, etc.

Using Google Analytics (a free tool – you just need to put a code in each page to enable it), to give you more trends of use, how long students stay on pages, which pages they leave from, what type of connections they use, and even such things as screen sizes they are using.

The output from these enables the tuning of material to match the patterns of use.  By changing the format to fit screens better, or the amount of content to suit the time the students normally stay on a page, although that could be a bit of a circular argument.

An obvious move is to then to link the analysis of the use of other systems, such as the library, to get a broader picture of how students are, or are not, using course resources.

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