Moodle

We had stats in the gradebook before?? :-P

If so, we definitely should create a new report called "stats". Roles can easily make these reports visible to particular roles.

Here's a screenshot showing the window that was displayed. I was mistaken, I thought there was one of these for each item in the gradebook. It looks like it is just for category. With that being the case, the only thing missing from calculations is the standard deviation which is what caught my attention and I suspect that will be easy to implement. I'd be happy to look into this and supply a patch. Peace - Anthony

On our 1.8 we have stats for each gradebook item. I thought it was standard, but we do have Gradebook plus v2 isntalled.

Michael - Ah, that's where I saw it, thanks I feel less insane! Peace - Anthony

OK - Here is a screen shot from GBPv2 patch which is where I had seen the stats for each assignment. I think this may be better implemented by a separate report plugin which is what folks were suggesting. Obviously since it is a feature not in core it is less important. For that reason, I'm going to lower the priority on this. Since I would like make the GBPv2 patch obsolete by 1.9 I would like to see the report plugin developed but this can wait until 1.9.2 (or whenever I get around to doing it). Martin if you want to assign this to me, I would be willing to take it on and check with folks before checking it in. Peace - Anthony

Sure, that'd be great! A standalone stats report in Moodle 2.0 (and perhaps backported to 1.9.1) could be a nice full-page thing. Perhaps some graphs too, that sort of thing?

Martin - I hope to have some time to play with this over the Spring Break in a few weeks but the fix in 2.0 should give me enough time to work on it Peace - Anthony

I'm hoping to work with Nicolas as a co-mentor and one of the students in the GSOC project to create statistical reports. Peace - Anthony

The fancy-looking visual report works in HEAD, it will be backported to 1.9.5 shortly.

Actually it seems the code was written to work in 1.9, which it does. The only trick is that groups must exist... Even if groups are disabled at the course level. I will fix that soon.

In the meantime, you can see this stunning report in http://test.moodle.org/1.9/grade/report/visual/index.php?id=2
username: teacher
password: testm00dle

I've just been looking at this on the 1.9 test site and it looks great! I found it a bit odd though to have the dropdown to choose the visualisation on the left, whereas the rest of the report is laid out on screen to be clicked on (much nicer) Is there a reason for this?

I also noticed that it says 'category total' lots of times, which is not very useful without knowing which category is which. This also applies to the user report, but it's easier to work out in that case as the category is specified.

Nicolas, thanks for adding the animated grade statistics report / visual report to test.moodle.org - it looks great!

Please could you fix the following small bugs which I found:

• Preferences help files missing (Incomplete grades as min, Count hidden grades, Count locked grades)
• Change report defaults link giving a error message

Matt, thanks for your comments.

Re. the visualization dropdown, do you think it would look better centred? I think it looks OK on the left, since other dropdown menus are often placed there.

Re. it saying 'category total' lots of times, I only found this in the grade distribution by group (bar) visualization. I'm not sure why!

Re. the capabilities to view the different visualizations, I found that not setting or preventing any/all of the capabilities had no effect on the visual report.

Small consistency issue: I think that only the first word in a capability description should be capitalized.

Re the dropdown, I was thinking that it would be far better if it was not a dropdown at all and instead looked like the selector for different assessment items that's on the right hand side. The thing with the dropdown is that you have to click on it to see what's available and it isn't immediately obvious that it will alter the appearance of the graph (the other bits that alter the appearance are not dropdowns but are clickable buttons, so it's not consistent).

Just noticed a few more odd bits:

Clicking on the visual report alters the order of the second row tabs so that 'visual report' is in the middle and not on the end.

On 'grade distribution by item (bar)', 'all groups' shows bars that extend below the bottom of the graph (Firefox).

Re the names of the different graphs - can we think of some better ones? They are a bit opaque and I can't work out what advantage any one of them has over the rest.

Clicking on the data points gives a pop-up that doesn't go away unless you click on another point or the original one. It would be good if it disappeared if you click on any empty space.

Many graphs automatically scale so that the highest grade is the top of the scale. This can be misleading and it would be good to have this as an option that can be toggled (more useful than 'hide axes' I think).

I did take a look at this and would make a few observations about what seems to be a somewhat slick set of visual graphs of grades:

1. It does not work with the Weighted grades course that I have on the test site.
2. It really does not address the issue of returning the summary statistics that was part of the gradebook before 1.9 that is the feature of this bug report. Specifically, it is nice to have, for each activity, the mean, median, min, max, standard deviation and inter-quartile range.

I like the idea of some type of straight-forward visual report in core.

Gary - Thanks for your comment about the mean, median, min, max, and sd - I did not notice these when I took a quick look at the graphs. I was hesitant to say something until having a chance to take a closer look but my initial impression was that while it provides some nice graphs, it was not getting at the heart of what this issue was about but I figured I just was missing something or not understanding what I was looking at. Peace - Anthony

Gary and Anthony, thanks for your comments. Apologies for my mistake in renaming this issue to focus on the animated grade statistics report. Rather than renaming it again though, let's use MDL-18163 for tracking the issue of providing summary statistics in the gradebook.

Thanks to everyone who has voted for this issue. Please amend your vote and/or vote for MDL-18163 according to whether you'd like the animated grade statistics report added and/or summary statistics.

Watchers, thanks for your interest in this issue. You may wish to watch MDL-18163 too.

To simplify things, let's remove the capabilities to view the different visualizations and just have one capability for viewing the visual report gradereport/visual:view

Submitted to HEAD, going to improve it now.

Matt and Gary, thanks for your comments.

Matt, I assume some of the issues which you mention can only be fixed by a Flash developer.

I'm having second thoughts about whether we should include the visual report in Moodle 1.9.5, as although it's very pretty, as Anthony mentions, is it really what teachers would want?

Helen - I find myself thinking more and more like a developer (I'm not sure if this is good or bad) but I think if it is a new feature it would be best to add it to 2.0. We can always provide a 1.9 patch for those who are interested but I am becoming less of a fan of adding new functionality, reports, etc. to released versions. That said, regardless of whether this is particularly what folks were looking for giving them another option is not a bad thing. We still have MDL-18163 to handle what this issue was initially intended for. So on a theoretical level, I would say wait for 2.0 but I would not have any strong objections if it were to wind up in 1.9. Peace - Anthony

I would tend to agree with Anthony - there's nothing wrong with sticking it in 1.9.5, especially as it won't impact on the rest of the gradebook and people are free to ignore it if they choose. It also may be better to include it to get feedback from a much wider audience so that an improved and polished version, hopefully more tuned in to teachers needs, appears in 2.0.

Matt - Good point on getting feedback. Reminds me that we need to encourage developing a community of testers. Peace - Anthony

I guess my own view is not to put it into 1.9.5 and instead keep it in CONTRIB for now. As I see it, the move should be to simplification, and it is really difficult to remove fancy new features once they are added to core. It is true that the feature may get more testing and even use, but I think the justification for adding something like this to core is that so many institutions use its specific features that would be too much of a hassle to have it added individually to a site.

There are also some of the graphs in this feature that don't seem to display grade summaries on the test course that I have on test.moodle.org, there is not the ability to configure the graphs well enough to make them fully useful, and I think that there is an inherit difficulty to have a graphing package that works well for both a large number of activities and for a small amount. Hence a one-size-fits-all visual presentation of grades is likely to be problematic to have be a standard feature, suggesting that a pluggin in CONTRIB that can be choosen is better.

Now what does need to be added back are basic summaries of activity grades like mean, median, SD, min, max, and probably quartiles (mode is usually not helpful). Speaking as one who teaches with Moodle all day, that is the information that I really miss and would like returned.

There are some more serious issues with this report in its current state, which IMO prevents it from being added to core.

1. Hard-coded group code: if you have no groups in your course, serious bugs appear, and groups features are not off-switchable
2. Hard-coded capabilities. If you try to remove capabilities, the flash stops working entirely
3. Many features are coded in ActionScript. You have to be able to change the code, then recompile the entire project in swf before seeing any change.
4. It's fat. It's over 3 Mb

+1 for leaving in contrib, but maybe leave it on the test server

Thanks everyone for your comments.

Bearing in mind the serious problems which Nicolas mentions, I'm removing the 1.9.5 fix version and have removed the issue from our list of stage 1 gradebook improvements.

Regarding how to add summary statistics to the Moodle 1.9 gradebook, please join the discussion here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=116953

I do not think it is good idea to backport this into STABLE yet:

1/ coding style problems
2/ security problems - missing types in rquired_param and optional_params, breaks our session fixation prevention
3/ non standard capability naming

Although this has had a lot of work already, it might be a good move to re-work it a little so that it uses the YUI charts widget, which looks very similar and solves several of the issues above. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/charts/charts-styles.html

Specifically, it would be far easier for future developers to maintain YUI based code than custom flash code, it would be more lightweight as it would include YUI libraries that have already been optimised, and t is also likely that the YUI charts will be used for other statistics reports elsewhere in Moodle at a later time, so it would be good to establish a consitent interface.

+1 to replace flash with YUI, Matt

Assigning to Andrew as gradebook component lead and setting a fix version of DEV backlog since it is an improvement.

Thanks Helen - I've just received a request from someone to get an update on the animated grade statistics or really just having access to statistics as in MDL-18163. I'd be happy to do some testing on this. Peace - Anthony

Thanks Anthony. Thanks Helen.
Andrew ..this would be a big big big boost to Moodle grade report. Waiting for this to happen patiently)