Motivating Students to Enhance Their Knowledge Levels Through Personalized and Scrutable Visual Narratives

Abstract

Continuous learning and development have been shown to be directly impacted by poor engagement. With the issue of poor engagement of learners with their course content when using Online Learning Environments (OLEs) still at large, this research aims to analyze the influence that visual narratives could have on encouraging students to study and improve their knowledge levels, and thereby support their continuous learning and development. Interactive and explorable visualizations have been commonly used in OLEs to support students’ continuous learning, development and engagement by highlighting their coverage of course content, presenting the tasks completed and their performance, displaying the students learning model and showing peer comparisons. However, personalized visual narratives that present student knowledge levels which can be scrutinized and challenged have not been used in OLEs to date. The research discussed in this paper shows how personalized and scrutable visual narratives encouraged students, enrolled into an adaptive OLE as part of their undergraduate degree program, to study their course content and subsequently improve their knowledge levels.