Overview
DocRank is a block type plugin for LMS made by students of the Berlin School of Economics and Law and meant to be used by schools and learning groups.
It collects data on how often documents are viewed within a course and visualizes the result as a chart.
This enables ranking of a document’s popularity and importance, urging users to read certain documents or pay closer attention to them.
The chart features various filters and sortings.
Installation
The plugin directory must be moved into …/lms/blocks/. There are several ways to achieve this.
You can install directly from the LMS plugins directory. To do this, log into your LMS as admin, go to Site administration > Plugins > Install plugins
and click the button ‘Install plugins from LMS plugins directory’. Search for the plugin and click the install button.
You can also use the Install plugins page to upload and install the plugin after you have downloaded it from the LMS plugins directory.
Simply drag and drop the ZIP file containing the DocRank directory into the given field, or use the ‘Choose a file…’ button.
Alternatively, you can do it manually. Download the ZIP from the LMS plugins directory, unzip it and move or copy the uncompressed folder into …/lms/blocks/.
Then, log into your LMS as admin and go to Settings > Site administration > Notifications.
You should get a notification about a new plugin being installed.
For more in-depth step-by-step instructions about installing block plugins,
Usage
If this plugin is active and was installed correctly, you’ll see a new block in your LMS course. Clicking the logo will open a new tab with a diagram in your browser.
There are several displays and sorting options, accessible via the elements above the chart.
You can change the number of documents shown in steps of 5, from a minimum of five up to the actual number of documents in the course. The chart will automatically resize itself to accommodate for the additional bars.
The documents can be sorted either by the number of clicks they received or by upload date. Use the arrow buttons to toggle between ascending and descending order.
The names of the documents, displayed to the left of their corresponding bar, double as links to the documents themselves.
By hovering your cursor above a bar, you can see the exact amount of clicks.
Technical Details
The plugin feeds data from the LMS database to jqPlot