Tracking OERs: Online analytics

This page is one of several describing technical approaches to tracking the use of OERs.

Google analytics (GA) (Wikipedia entry) is the most well known and most widely used member of a class of online software services that use a number of approaches to provide an analysis of the usage of web-based resources; a well known open alternative is piwik. Most of these, GA included, use a combination of javascript code and cookies to log information such as how often a resource is used, some of the characteristics of the user's web client, and the link the user followed to arrive at that resource, the last of which can also give information about keywords used to find the resource on a search engine. Technically this involves the insertion of some javascript tracking code into the pages being tracked, this tracking code includes an identifier for a report that aggregates the statistics from individual resources: these reports can be shared over sites and statistics for an individual resource can be aggregated into multiple reports.


 * Funders of OER programmes or distributed projects can require OER providers to use a shared analytics code to monitor usage of all the relevant resources. For example, the OU's OpenLearn uses two GA trackers, one for internal monitoring the other shared with other projects funded by the Hewlett Foundation. This provides information on which resources are heavily used and which aren't and need promotion or retiring.


 * Information on the link that users follow that brings them to the OER can be useful in monitoring who is referring to that resource.


 * The tracking code only works for HTML documents; if your OERs are in another format then you need another approach


 * Some web content management systems limit what JavaScript can be embedded into resources. Also, this approach is a complete non-starter if the resources are hosted on a third-party web2.0 site.


 * Some people object to having their use of the web tracked in this way and take active measures to block the tracking.