Tracking, Analyzing, and Visualizing Learners' Activities on Discussion Forums

Madeth May (1) , Sébastien George (1) , Patrick Prévôt (1)

1 LIESP - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour l'Entreprise et les Systèmes de Production

Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) tools, such as forums, chats, etc., have become compulsory for distance learning situations, in facilitating the communications between learners, and between learners and instructors. Meanwhile, tracking the communications on CMC tools has also become one among other research interests and brought up a number of challenges and difficulties: exploitation of collected traces, providing synthetic information of communication activities via trace analysis, reusability of traces, etc. Our research works are biased toward methodological challenges involved in designing and developing a generic system for tracking user's activities while interacting with asynchronous communication tools like discussion forums. The main aim of the suggested approach that we present in this paper is for building a Web-based system architecture, which is composed of different trace collectors (client side and server side), trace manipulation procedures, trace repository, trace analysis, and trace visualization.

Mots clés: E-learning; discussion forum; tracking system; tracking learners' activities; exploitation of traces; visualizing traces

Domaines: Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain; Education

Madeth May, Sébastien George, Patrick Prévôt. Tracking, Analyzing, and Visualizing Learners' Activities on Discussion Forums. International Conference on Web-based Education (WBE 2007), Mar 2007, Chamonix, France. pp.649-656. ⟨hal-00195947⟩