Visualising Virtual Learning Environments: Case Studies of the Website Exploration Tool

Abstract

In this paper we describe the long term evaluation of the Website Exploration Tool (WET), an exploratory system for visualising web data, through the assessment of two Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). VLEs provide log files that can be studied with web mining techniques to understand the behaviour of the students and consequently improve the pedagogy. However, statistical metrics are not always easy to interpret for the educators, which suggests the need to develop novel approaches for the easy discovery of usage patterns. The integration of WET in the assessment process of two VLEs gave us the opportunity to conduct long-term case studies that supported the evaluation of the visual approaches used in our tool. Our main contributions are the description of the benefits of such approaches for the analysis of VLEs as well as recommended features for supporting this task, and a summary of the main findings from our case studies.