Insights gained from tracking users’ Movements through a cyberlearning system’s mediation interface

Abstract

Cyberlearning has the ability to connect learners from diverse settings to learning resources regardless of the learners’ proximity to traditional classroom environments. Tracking users’ movements through a cyberlearning interface provides data that can be used both to interpret students’ level of engagement in the learning process and to improve the cyberlearning system’s user mediation interface. The Online Watershed Learning System (OWLS), which serves as the end user interface of the Learning Enhanced Watershed Assessment System (LEWAS), is an open-ended guided cyberlearning system that delivers integrated live and/or historical environmental monitoring data and imagery. Anonymous user tracking in the OWLS helped to identify students from various courses as ‘groups of users’ across the world and assisted in providing information about the importance of various components of the mediation interface. A pilot test of this tracking capability was conducted in two first-year engineering courses at Virginia Western Community College during the fall 2015 semester. During this pilot test, tracking data was collected from a total of roughly 80 students from a total of four course sections. The data collected included the amount of time that each student spent using each component of the OWLS, the paths that he or she used to navigate through these components and how frequently each student returned to the OWLS. Suggestions for system modifications based on comparison of the time students spent using various system components with students’ post-test evaluation of the educational value of these components are included. To address the limitation of the data collected during the pilot study, which could not identify a user across different devices, a user login system is being developed for investigating individualized learning. The current system will address the need to understand in real-time the learner-specific pathways of content and progression, and these learners’ levels of engagement within the system.