Some interest has been expressed in the development of an administrative tool to draw together and present usage statistics for UC Davis Sakai/SmartSite. Before moving forward, we want to get people's opinions on what they would like to see happen in this direction.
There are several different groups that may have both overlapping and non-overlapping requirements for assessing the actual usage of Sakai on a campus-wide basis.
Potential solutions will probably fall into at least one of these two areas.
Most likely, we will encounter some constraints when it comes to mining the database on account of the sheer quantity of data involved. Tables that contain event data are frequently truncated, so any long-term monitoring would require some aggregation and archiving of data. Also, depending on the complexity, it may be necessary to batch some of the queries and/or denormalize some of the assessment data.
A group in Portugal has put together a tool called SiteStats, which is currently marked as a Sakai Contrib. It provides what is effectively an instructor-level view of usage on a site-by-site basis, which does not at the moment seem to fit exactly with what's needed here at UC Davis. But it may be possible to make use of some of their code or user interface.
– Confluence Docs: http://issues.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/Gz0
– SVN for v2.1.x: https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/ufp/sakai_2-1-x/sitestats/
Indiana has a tool-by-tool break down of their usage by semester including percentage change in usage since the previous year. Not clear on whether this is a one-time data mining action or a tool they have implemented.
At this point in time, the following is just a wish list because we don't know yet if it's possible to determine all these statistical data points from the currently collected data in Sakai.
Once we have a complete UCD functionality wish list, we need to determine/research, which functionalities can actually be implemented. Feel free to add any comments below.