VizIT

Features

• Course metrics dashboard:
  • Develop metrics and visualizations to present and compare
    • course structure,
    • enrollment and retention,
    • students’ engagement and learning patterns etc. for edX instructors and administrators
  • Streamline and automate the process of data import, data munging and visualization in creating dashboards for various courses

Prerequisites:

1. You need a Google account with Editor access to a BigQuery project. The owner of the account must generate a service account.

2. Download the Google Credentials file:

   • "Go to the API Console Credentials page.
   • From the project drop-down, select your project.
   • On the Credentials page, select the Create credentials drop-down, then select Service account key.
   • From the Service account drop-down, select an existing service account or create a new one.
   • For Key type, select the JSON key option, then select Create. The file automatically downloads to your computer.
   • Put the *.json file you just downloaded in a directory of your choosing. This directory must be private (you can't let anyone get access to this).
   • Set the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS to the path of the JSON file downloaded."

3. Prepare a list of the courses to be processed (one course name a row) and put them into a file named courses.txt. To maintain and update the list of courses to generate dashboards for, without accessing the server, first create a Google spreadsheet, set it to view-only, then further give edit permissions to the relevant users. Place addcoursestogenerate.py at /yourdirectory and set a cronjob:

45 10 * * 2 cd /yourdirectory; /yourdirectory/python /yourdirectory/addcoursestogenerate.py

The relevant users can then add courses to the spreadsheet; the cronjob will take these courses and add them to courses.txt, which is used to generate dashboards. This way, users can specify new courses to generate dashboards for without having to edit courses.txt on the server.

4. You also need to load all your edX data into Google BigQuery using edx2bigquery

Using VizIT

• Replace occurrences of "yourprojectname" in the .ipynb files with your BigQuery project name

• Create an empty directory to host generated pages

mkdir vizit

• Run VizIT docker container to generate pages:

docker run -it -v /PATH/TO/GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS:/home/jovyan/work/google.json -v /PATH/TO/courses.txt:/home/jovyan/work/courses.txt -v $(pwd)/vizit:/home/jovyan/work/results ubcctlt/vizit ./generate.sh

All the pages will be placed inside vizit directory.

Developers

• Clone the current repository

Download from edX and upload to Google BigQuery

• Get in touch with edX for arranging data downloads for your institution

• Set up credentials for data download here

• Set up your passphrase to phrase.txt

• Edit edx_weekly_course_data_download_import2BigQuery.sh and edx_download_dailyevents_moveto_BigQuery.sh to specify your directories, as appropriate

• Clone the edx2bigquery repository and follow their instructions for installation

• Maintain the list of courses for which you wish to upload events and course data in edx2bigquery_config.py from edx2bigquery

• Set up cronjobs for uploading events daily, and course data weekly:

0 8 * * * source /yourdirectory/.bash_profile; /yourdirectory/edx_download_dailyevents_moveto_BigQuery.sh >> /yourdirectory/events.log 2>&1

0 11 * * 1 source /yourdirectory/.bash_profile; /yourdirectory/edx_weekly_course_data_download_import2BigQuery.sh >> /yourdirectory/courses.log 2>&1

• Set up cronjobs for automatically adding new courses, as they appear in the edX dumps, to edx2bigquery_config.py

55 10 * * 2 cd /yourdirectory/rawsqldir/; DIRECTORY=$(ls -td -- */ | head -n 1); ls $DIRECTORY | grep .xml.tar.gz > /yourdirectory/directory.txt

0 11 * * 2 cd /yourdirectory; /yourdirectory/python /yourdirectory/addcourses.py

Generate dashboards pages

• Copy your Google Credential file into the repo directory and name it as google.json

• Copy the course list courses.txt into the repo directory and name it as courses.txt. To maintain and update the list of courses to generate dashboards for, without accessing the server, first create a Google spreadsheet, set it to view-only, then further give edit permissions to the relevant users. Place addcoursestogenerate.py at /yourdirectory and set a cronjob:

45 10 * * 2 cd /yourdirectory; /yourdirectory/python /yourdirectory/addcoursestogenerate.py

The relevant users can then add courses to the spreadsheet; the cronjob will take these courses and add them to courses.txt, which is used to generate dashboards. This way, users can specify new courses to generate dashboards for without having to edit courses.txt on the server.

• Update the ipynb files; replace occurrences of "yourprojectname" in the .ipynb files with your BigQuery project name

• Run the following command to generate the pages:

docker run -it -v $(pwd):/home/jovyan/work yourdirectory/vizit ./generate.sh

The pages will be generated in the results/ directory

• To generate a single page simply run the command

docker run -it -v $(pwd):/home/jovyan/work -e current_course=COURSE_NAME yourdirectory/vizit jupyter nbconvert --execute $current_course coursepage.ipynb --ExecutePreprocessor.kernel_name=python && mv coursepage.html results/$current_course.html

• To periodically generate dashboards pages, set a cronjob:

0 11 * * 2 cd /yourdirectory/vizit; docker run -v $(pwd):/home/jovyan/work yourdirectory/vizit ./generate.sh >> generatedashboards.log 2>&1

Deploy VizIT

• Set up a build system with a Git repository that will deploy to a public-facing website/URL

• Edit deploy.sh to match your directories as appropriate

• Set up a cronjob to periodically deploy generated dashboards pages:

0 14 * * 2 /bin/bash /yourdirectory/deploy.sh >> /yourdirectory/generatepushalledge.log 2>&1