Visualizing activities for self-reflection and awareness

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. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.