Web Tracking

[tamifraughton]

We are trying to run an experiment where participants would move through an online class lesson. We want to use our own web pages for them to navigate though, but we would like to use MediaLab to track the time they spend on each page, and the links they click on. We have figured out how to run the web page through MediaLab, but the problem we encounter is that when the page runs through MediaLab, it does not have a search bar at the top of the browser (which is important in our study as we want to track any other online behaviors the students engage in as they are moving through the lesson, e.g. checking email, facebook, etc...) Basically, we don't want the participants to be limited to browsing only pages that can be visited by clicking on links appearing on the current page.

We tried to work around this by figuring out how to open Firefox as a seperate application out of MediaLab, but we don't know if the web tracker will work when the browser is opened as a second appliction and the web pages are not run direclty out of MediaLab.

Is MediaLab capable of tracking behaviors when the browser is opened as a seperate application, or is there a way for the tool/searchbar to appear at the top of the browser when it is opened up in MediaLab?

[jarvis24]

The following is from the user's guide on the topic of using HTML items. I think it also applies to the WebTracker item type:

Optionally, you can have navigation buttons appear while HTML pages are displayed. You can display any or all of: back, forward, home (will return to the starting URL), refresh and search. To enable this option, simply create a text file in your experiment folder called "browser.txt" and copy the following into it, changing true to false for any buttons you do not want displayed.

back = true
forward = true
stop = true
home = true
refresh = true
search = true