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One of our research projects could use a good piece of software that could track activity about as well as a web server, a sort of benign spyware.
Okay, so we've got this online tutoring system we're developing, and a high school has agreed to participate in the alpha. Everyone at the school has a laptop, but not everyone has reliable internet access. So we're thinking of just dumping a working copy of the website onto a DVD and providing that to the non-net-enabled students.
The problem is that such a copy won't let us know how the resource is used. The ones who log into the real thing we can track in all the usual ways. We can see where they clicked and when, what they typed, etc. We'd like that level of recording on the offline participants too, but the only thing we currently have is a "record a movie of their screen" program. And aside from being an utter resource hog, that program requires licenses.
So, I figured I'd ask around here, since plenty of people I know on LJ are techie sorts who might have (cough) experimented with spyware. Is there a sort of benign spyware that we could include with the DVD so that we could get student usage info? It'd have to be fairly small and unobtrustive, and most importantly it'd need to be easily removed after the experiment was over. They're all probably Windows laptops, but something with available Mac and Linux ports would be nice too, just in case.
There's probably other FERPA-related and IRB-related details we'd need to worry about, but if any of y'all know some good starting points I can pass them on to the relevant grad students, who can see which ones pass legal muster.
Okay, so we've got this online tutoring system we're developing, and a high school has agreed to participate in the alpha. Everyone at the school has a laptop, but not everyone has reliable internet access. So we're thinking of just dumping a working copy of the website onto a DVD and providing that to the non-net-enabled students.
The problem is that such a copy won't let us know how the resource is used. The ones who log into the real thing we can track in all the usual ways. We can see where they clicked and when, what they typed, etc. We'd like that level of recording on the offline participants too, but the only thing we currently have is a "record a movie of their screen" program. And aside from being an utter resource hog, that program requires licenses.
So, I figured I'd ask around here, since plenty of people I know on LJ are techie sorts who might have (cough) experimented with spyware. Is there a sort of benign spyware that we could include with the DVD so that we could get student usage info? It'd have to be fairly small and unobtrustive, and most importantly it'd need to be easily removed after the experiment was over. They're all probably Windows laptops, but something with available Mac and Linux ports would be nice too, just in case.
There's probably other FERPA-related and IRB-related details we'd need to worry about, but if any of y'all know some good starting points I can pass them on to the relevant grad students, who can see which ones pass legal muster.
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(you'd need a pretty hardcore EULA for this)
how about ...
- in the install package is a program that creates a log file of user info
- it pings for intertubes access every time the user runs or closes the program, if there is intertubes, it uploads the user info file
So my answer is, no, I don't know of a program that does this offhand, but I'm thinking of the error reporting that Windows has for when a program crashes.
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