Tutorials



Welcome to The cRunch Tutorials!

This hub of tutorials was created by the project 'Technology-Enhanced Learning Living-lab for Manufacturing Environments' (TELL-ME). It was introduced originally in support of the 2013 MOOC on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK'13). It has been extended for a tutorial given to the doctoral school in May 2013 at the Institute for Business Informatics of the Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, and it was grown further for the workshop at the Joint European Summer School in Technology-Enhanced Learning (JTEL-SS, May 2013, Cyprus).

If you want an account on cRunch, please fill in your details here.

You want to contribute? Find here some guideliens on How To create tutorials.

Getting started
Open Source communities have started to invest heavily into the development of learning analytics. One particularly rewarding example of that is the R community, which is centred in on statistics and exploratory data programming.

Within this tutorial, we will be taking a closer look on R and we will be using cRunch and Rstudio for it. cRunch is both infrastructure and community platform for computationally-intense learning analytics, supporting researchers in investigating big data generated in the co-construction of knowledge. cRunch runs a web-based, exploratory data mash-up environment for R (Rstudio, also available as desktop software) and provides sharing facilities for data, scripts, and reports.

You best know basics about scripting in any other programming language and you should be familiar with simple data analysis as created with basic Excel knowledge.

To get things rolling:


 * View the introductory video
 * Download Rstudio or register an account with cRunch
 * Work through some or all of the tutorials below.
 * Create your own analytics (you can bring your own data :)
 * Don't forget to share!

The tutorials (basics)
In the first section you will find a few rather generic introductory tutorials and how-to's. If you are not familiar with R (or similar languages), then the first one is highly recommended. If you want to become more familiar with the web studio environment (and cRunch's facilities to create reports, release open data, etc.) then the other ones listed are the thing to go for.


 * Tutorial (R Basics)
 * Tutorial as live script
 * Releasing a web service on cRunch written in R
 * Using MySQL on cRunch
 * Release Open Data on cRunch

The tutorials (learning analytics)
The Learning Analytics specific tutorials follow below. This set of online tutorials demonstrates how to do very particular types of Learning Analytics.


 * Social Network Analysis
 * Social Network Analysis of a blog network (with open data!)
 * Social Network Analysis Basics
 * The Social Networks hidden in forum data


 * Natural Language Processing
 * Indexing texts with Latent Semantic Analysis
 * Scoring Essays with Latent Semantic Analysis
 * Latent Semantic Analysis with Sparse Matrices


 * Passion Technologies
 * Sentiment detection in tweets (Experimental)
 * Affective states: engagement and excitement in a heated debate


 * Twitter
 * Monitoring weekly learner activity with TwitteR
 * Using a Google Spreadsheet csv export to create a #LAK13 twitter monitor
 * Very extensive Twitter analysis tutorial (by Bodong Chen)


 * Complex data
 * SPARQLing in R
 * Extensive analysis of the student census data from the Toronto District School Board (from the Knowledge Network of Applied Education Research, KNAER)


 * Predictions
 * with linear models
 * Interrater agreement
 * Dependencies between LMS usage and learning results on the basis of .LRN log-files
 * Validating and exploiting Open Government Data