Visualizing Activities for Self-reflection and Awareness Sten Govaerts, Katrien Verbert, Joris Klerkx, and Erik Duval Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Department of Computer Science Celestijnenlaan 200A, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium {sten.govaerts,joris.klerkx,katrien.verbert,erik.duval}@cs.kuleuven.be http://hmdb.cs.kuleuven.be Abstract. With the large uptake of online learning environments in educational institutions, students and teachers interact no longer solely face-to-face and are often geographically dispersed. Distance education can make it much harder for students to position themselves in the group of fellow students and to self-reflect on their work. The teacher can have similar problems by losing the general overview of the class, which makes it hard to discover potential pitfalls of students in time. To assist with this problem, we have developed a set of visualizations of learner activities to increase awareness and to support self-reflection. This paper discusses those visualizations and evaluates the usability and user satisfaction. From these studies, first preliminary results are available of the usefulness of the tool for the students. A planned future evaluation is discussed to evaluate the real usage and impact of the tool. Key words: Visualization, Learning activities, Monitoring, Self-reflection, Usability, User satisfaction, Awareness 1 Introduction Nowadays, most educational institutions use online learning environments to support their courses. This evolution enables easy distribution of course mate- rial, remote participation and collaboration and increased interactivity between geographically dispersed teachers and students. On the other hand, some things also substantially change with moving to a more digital classroom environment. In a real life classroom, students often get faster feedback on their efforts by the teacher and their peers, and can position themselves among their fellow students through continuous social contact. In dig- ital learning environments, it is much harder for students to position themselves. For example a student does not know if he is working a lot for a course relative to others or whether he is doing what the teachers expect. The same counts for online group work, where the level of participation can vary significantly between different students and some students can dominate others. Different solutions are available, e.g. careful design of the online course and close follow up of students [1]. Using self-reflection also increases motivation and participation [2].

2 Visualizing Activities for Self-reflection and Awareness In this paper, we try to tackle these issues through analyzing and visualizing learner activities. We believe that visualizations allow users to understand and discover patterns in data more easily. We also concur with Napoleon Bonaparte���s famous saying: Un bon croquis vaut mieux qu���un long discours (meaning: A good sketch is better than a long speech). Visualizations of learner activities can motivate students, provide feedback on their work [3], reveal participation and detect who is working harder or taking a free ride. The user activities can also be interesting for learning material recommendations. Knowing what other students are studying can be very helpful to make progress with the course. First, we will look into related research. Then, we will discuss the objectives of the tool, the design choices and implementation. Afterwards, we will explain the evaluation. We conclude with possible extensions and future evaluation. 2 Related work Visualization of personal and social data, such as user activities, social networks and live logging [4], is a popular research topic in various application domains. We focus on education, where different approaches have been researched. Jermann et al. [5] have reviewed several systems that visualize learner activ- ities to increase awareness and collaboration among learners. The distinction is made between systems that reflect actions and those that monitor the interac- tion state. The first category provides basic support for improving awareness of actions taken on resources, for instance along a timeline. The second category includes support for aggregating data into a set of high-level indicators that are displayed to users. For instance, analyzing participation rates with word counts and message reply delays, and relating this back to an ideal model. Our tool situates itself in the first and partly in the second category, because it visualizes student activities over time and also provides some simple statistics on time ex- penditure and document use. We focus on presenting the data and due to the di���culty related to it, we are not developing learning models from the data. Several other systems visualize learner activities with different objectives: improving collaboration among learners, increasing awareness, supporting self- reflection and enabling the discovery of peer learners through social network analysis. CAMera [6] is a tool for personal monitoring and reporting. CAMera uses Contextualized Attention Metadata (CAM) [7] that capture the interac- tions of users with resources and tools and provides simple metrics, statistics and visualizations of the activities of the learner. It also visualizes a social net- work based on email communication. We build on CAM data, which enables any system that produces CAM to use the visualization. Colleagues of the de- velopers found it useful to use, but a larger evaluation is not yet available. The main difference with CAMera is that our tool uses time expenditure data of stu- dent groups to analyze higher-level indicators, e.g. CAMera visualizes personal mouse clicks. The Participation Tool [3] visualizes the online communication of students doing group work. Janssen et al. showed that students using the Partic- ipation Tool participated and coordinated more than students without the tool.