4.3. Resources for Data Czars and Researchers#

This section provides a list of resources for data czars and researchers.

Data czars and researchers are encouraged to participate in the edX community and make use of these resources.

4.3.1. Finding and Sharing Tools and Scripts#

The edx-tools wiki on the GitHub web site hosts a community-contributed library of scripts for working with edX data. It also provides links to additional public tools, such as the data model standard and frameworks defined by the MOOCdb project and the data analytics platform and course report generator developed by the MOOCczar project.

Data czars and research teams are welcome to add tools, scripts, and links to this wiki.

4.3.2. Using the edX Analytics Forums#

Data czars, researchers, and members of the global edX data and analytics community can post and discuss questions in the public research forum by joining the openedx-analytics Google group. Members of the community use this group to share use cases and experiences, post general data processing questions, ask for and share scripts, and begin broad conversations about student engagement.

The edX Partner Portal also offers community forums, including a Research and Analytics topic, for discussions among edX partners. To use the edX Partner Portal, you must register and request verification as an edX partner.

Important

Do not post sensitive data to public forums.

Data czars who have questions that involve sensitive data, or that are institution specific, can send the questions by email to data.support@edx.org with a copy to your organization’s edX partner manager.

4.3.3. Finding and Sharing Research Papers#

Members of the community have published a number of research papers. The following edX blog posts summarize research by Harvard and MIT and include links to additional resources.

The edx.org web site includes a Research & Pedagogy page that edX updates periodically with references to research papers and articles about research topics. To share publications on this page, contact your edX partner manager.

4.3.4. Using the edX Insights Documentation and Code#

The Using edX Insights guide describes the metrics and visualizations that Insights produces, gives examples of using contextual course information to interpret and act on Insights data, and provides a computation reference.

The code base for Insights is public, and can be found in several related GitHub repositories. Tasks in edx-analytics-pipeline create the data for edx-analytics-data-api, which is then surfaced in edx-analytics-dashboard.

You can post questions about working with the Insights code to the openedx-analytics Google group.