Applying analytics for a learning portal: the Organic.Edunet case study

Abstract

Learning portals are education-oriented Web portals, which provide access to a variety of educational material, usually coming from various sources. In order to explore how they can support their users during an educational activity (e.g. preparation of teaching a course), it would be interesting to study the behavior of their visitors, focusing on the particular context in which specific actions are taking place. For example, user activities may be analyzed during specific learning events, when activities are more focused. This paper discusses the case study of the Organic.Edunet Web portal (www.organic-edunet.eu), a learning portal for organic agriculture educators that provides access to more than 10,500 learning resources from a federation of 11 institutional repositories. The portal mostly focuses on serving school teachers and university tutors and has attracted until today almost 42.200 unique visitors from more than 160 countries, out of which about 2.600 have registered to the portal. An effort is made to study the users' behavior, focusing in tutors and educators in both schools and universities, in relation to specific training events in which we know that they have been involved. Therefore, we analyze logs of user activities that took place on specific dates and geographical locations, in order to potentially identify notable changes in their normal visiting behavior.