Understanding it
Doing it right
Implementing it
About this project
- Introduction
- Benefits
- Lessons Learnt
- High Level Guidance
- Data Protection
- Licensing and Sharing Activity Data
- Collecting, Processing and Presenting Data
- JISC Projects
- Related Work
- Technical Recipes
- Synthesis Method
- Recommendations for Further Work
- Acknowledgements
About Activity Data
Successful organisations are increasingly collecting and making use of their activity data. Exploiting your institutions activity data allows you to understand and support your users more effectively and manage your resources more efficiently. Three examples illustrate how you could benefit from exploiting the data
- Identifying and supporting at risk students earlier to reduce the number of students leaving courses or failing can be achieved through understanding patterns of behaviour from the students (eg through the use of the VLE, accessing library resources, attendance data).
- Providing recommendations for resources that support learning and research by using the results of other people's searches that relate to the users' current search.
- Understanding how resources are actually being used so that it becomes possible to plan more effectively.
This web site synthesises the work of the JISC funded activity data programme in order to help you to understand how you might benefit from exploiting activity data. Beyond the benefits it discusses the legal considerations that you need to be aware of (primarily data protection and data licensing) before looking in some detail at how to actually exploit your activity data .
The site also contains a set of guides that provide an overview of particular topics and a set of detailed "recipes" that explain how to undertake some of the detailed technical tasks for particular systems that were used in the projects.
To get an overview you will probably find the following sections most useful.
- Introduction
- Benefits of using activity data
- Data protection
- Guides
For a more detailed understanding you will find it useful to additionally look at the following sections:
- Collecting, processing and presenting activity data
- Lessons learnt by the projects
- Licensing and sharing activity data
- Recipes
This online resource was produced by the JISC-funded Activity Data Synthesis Project at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester. The project team consisted on Tom Franklin, Helen Harrop, David Kay and Mark van Harmelen.
The contents of the web site are licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 ‘no rights reserved’ licence to enable free reuse.
Business Benefit & Strategic Imperative Full Site Text (pdf)
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