From a blog post entitled "
Analytics use by UK Universities" at
All things Analytical:
I have just trawled through all the Universities in the UK as listed on the Wikipedia page - List of UK universities by size and record what Analytics packages that they are using.
WASP Market Research feature
This quick study was conducted manually for 167 UK Universities, but
WASP Market Research feature is more powerful. For some of the private market research I've been conducting, I've done checks for 10,000 different websites picked off a file containing one entry per line. This demonstrates you can aim for a very narrow vertical market or pick a much larger sample, maybe for a specific region or vertical, and let WASP do the job for you.
Interesting comment from the author of the post, David Mackland:
While I am not surprised that Google Analytics scores so high I am surprised that there are only 8 different solutions being used. It is also noted that some institutions run 2 solutions in parallel. The majority of those institutions that are running multiple packages are running both Google Analytics and Nedstat. We do that at Abertay so we have analytics to view should we decide to change our provider. Of the 37 institutions who don’t have detectable analytics packages one would hope that the majority of these institutions are performing analytics on their web logs. What also surprises me is the lack of use of Woopra across other institutions. Is anybody else trying this out on their University web sites? Have you seen it yet?
A note about Woopra
Woopra looks like a great open-source e-learning platform. Starting this fall, the
Web Analytics Award of Achievement at the
University of British Columbia will now be offered on this platform. Being a tutor for some of those courses, I had a demo and I played with it for a bit. As a student myself, I used other platforms such as WebCT which, according to
Wikipedia, was developed by a faculty member of the UBC a while back! Woopra appears to be much more of its age, with more collaborative features, a slicker interface and a lot easier to use for students and tutors. I wouldn't be surprised if other Universities around the world also embrace this platform.
