Design, Development And Application Of Moodle Social Network Analysis Plugin

Moodle is a world’s most widely used learning platform, designed to provide educators, administrators and students a simple and reliable, safe and integrated system, to create a personalized learning environment. Powering tens of thousands of learning environments globally, Moodle is trusted by institutions and organisations large and small, including Shell, London School of Economics, State University of New York, Microsoft and the Open University. Using the method of social network analysis can help administrators and educators analysis the structure of the social network in Moodle, thus providing an effective basis to develop appropriate learning strategies and put forward the corresponding suggestion. However, today the main method to collect current social network analysis data in Moodle is manual observation, obviously the workload of the analyst is error prone, data reliability is low and can only handle a small amount of data; visualization and caculation related to social network can be achieved by social network software, but to master the operation of these software is not easy thing to most teachers, which improves analysis requirement. The purpose of this study is to break through the limitations of existing software tools, reduce the administrators, educators for social network analysis of the threshold for Moodle, so administrators, educators can complete social network data collection, calculation, visualization from multi-level(the website forum, course). Let more front-line teachers and administrators can participate in the study of social network analysis in Moodle, so as to promote exploration learning community structure and interaction rules thus improving learning and teaching effect.This paper used the literature analysis and network research methods to investigate domestic and international Moodle plug-ins development situation, analyzed the development of Moodle social network analysis program. We found that, in contrast to the Moodle plug-in development in foreign countries, there is a big gap bettween here and abroad. The social network analysis program developed for Moodle can analyze certain social network.,However, there are many limitations in the installation and function. Then the author designed a new program to help people analysis social network in Moodle quickly and easily in details. On this basis, using php web development technology and database technology, and refering to Moodle plug-in development documents, and the software engineering spiral model,the author developed the program.And then tested it with the integration use of white box test and white box test, from the aspects like the code logic, portability, functionality, performance and environment etc.. At last, applying the Moodle social network analysis to a Moodle website which was running for many years.The main conclusions of this study:the Moodle social network analysis plugin developed by the author allows analysts to quickly and easily analysis the whole network and ego centered network from the site, course, forum levels. It can draw sociogram, export the community matrix in excel format, complete relative caculation (like the density,centrality and so on), and export SNA data collection in csv format which can be imported into other SNA softwares.time range and flexible the results showed diverse ways, installation simple operation,the installation of the pragram is simply and easy. It supports most mainstream browsers and all versions of Moodle2.2+; the use of SQL statement which can handle large amounts of data quickly and accurately has the great advantages to complete SNA data collection; Three periods development help the author a lot during development,and the five modules in the pragram are independent to each other, maybe they can provide certain reference for other similar developments.