Evaluation of a blog-based learning analytics tool: A case study focusing on teachers

Abstract

The current paper presents a case study for evaluating an Interaction Analysis (IA) toolkit for blogs, called GIANT (Graphical Interaction Analysis Tool). The paper focuses on the perspective of the teachers and investigates the hypothesis that IA techniques could be implemented in educational group-blogging systems, as a tool for supporting teachers. The main objective of the study is to provide an indication that teachers could be facilitated, in the process of evaluating and assessing students’ interaction and participation, through the real-time generated graphs from the GIANT toolkit. This paper also provides further evaluation evidence for the GIANT toolkit, from a teachers’ point of view, in terms of overall teacher satisfaction, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of learning. Particularly, 32 secondary education teachers’ used and evaluated GIANT during a collaborative blog-based activity with students from a literature course. Overall, teachers were to a large extent satisfied with their facilitation from the GIANT toolkit, during their blogging experience, rating the automatically generated IA graphs as useful, easy to understand and decode.