OLab3 case analytics technical report

OpenLabyrinth (latterly OLab) is an educational research platform, which was originally designed to create and publish virtual patients, but has gone on to become a powerful toolset for examining many aspects of decision-making and problem-solving. It has a web-based front-end and a SQL database on the back-end. Here, we also introduce the concept of paradata as opposed to metadata: paradata is data about how a resource or learning object is used; metadata is data that describes properties of that resource or learning object. This is a technical report which assumes that readers have quite a high level of familiarity with the OLab platform. It is not a how-to on use of the platform or on how to create interesting learning designs.

OpenLabyrinth（原称OLab）是一款教育研究平台，其初始设计用途为创建并发布虚拟患者，后续逐步演进为可用于研究决策制定与问题解决诸多维度的强大工具集。该平台具备基于网页的前端界面与后端结构化查询语言（SQL）数据库。本文同时阐释了伴随数据（Paradata）与元数据（Metadata）的概念差异：伴随数据指用于记录某一资源或学习对象使用方式的数据，而元数据则用于描述该资源或学习对象的各项属性。本文为一篇技术报告，默认读者已对OLab平台拥有较高的熟悉程度，并非一份讲解平台使用方法或如何设计优质学习活动的操作指南。