Proprietary and open source tools in learning analytic

These are the tools which can be used in field of learning analytics.

• Data Cleaning/Integration
  1. Pentaho Integration
     • This is a very interesting tool which can get data from structured and non-structured sources including databases. This tool from the looks of it can integrate from hbase, hadoop to mongodb or mysql and the latest big data storage system in between. This is similar to ETL in oracle databases but it can accept a lot of input datasources.
     • Pros: 
       • Has a lot of support for visual tools from where you can specify where to get the data from and what kind of transformation to make.
       • There are visual administration and other visual tools to get the work done
       • Has support for weka modules.
     • Cons
       • R is a very big name in big data and this tool does not provide integration for R. Yes, you can try to write your tools which communicates with R but without in-built support it would be very difficult to use R.
  2. MongoDB
     • I find that mongodb can easily handle unstructured data and provides very easy ways to get data in from csv or excel etc to a collection/database in mongodb. It is easier to manipulate the dataset within mongodb.
     • Pros
       • Has a lot of support for language libraries like PHP, Java etc which is good. Also, you can always use REST support for other language for there are no mongo libraries.
       • Has support for aggregation framework.
     • Cons
       • Does not allow for concurrency between objects
       • There are very few visual tools for mongodb.
• Visualization Tools
  • d3.js, Google Charts, Tableau
• Analysis Tools
  • R, Weka