Towards Networked Learning Analytics – A concept and a tool

Networked learning is much more ambitious than previous approaches of ICT-support in education. It is therefore more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the networked learning activities. Evaluation of learners ’ interactions in netw

Towards Networked Learning Analytics – A concept

and a tool

S. Retalis1, A. Papasalouros1, Y. Psaromiligkos2, S. Siscos2, T. Kargidis3 1University of Piraeus; 2Technological Education Institute of Piraeus; 3Technological

Educational Institution of Thessaloniki

retal@unipi.gr; andpapas@softlab.ntua.gr; siskakos1978@yahoo.gr; jpsa@teipir.gr;

<kargidis@mkt.teithe.gr

ABSTRACT

Networked learning is much more ambitious than previous approaches of ICT-support in education. It is therefore more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the networked learning activities. Evaluation of learners’ interactions in networked learning environments is a difficult, resource and expertise demanding task. Educators participating in online learning environments, have very little support by integrated tools to evaluate students’ activities and identify learners’ online browsing behavior and interactions. As a consequence, educators are in need for non-intrusive and automatic ways to get feedback from learners’ progress in order to better follow their learning process and appraise the online course effectiveness. They also need specialized tools for authoring, delivering, gathering and analysing data for evaluating the learning effectiveness of networked learning courses.

Thus, the aim of this paper is to propose a new set of services for the evaluator and lecturer so that he/she can easily evaluate the learners’ progress and produce evaluation reports based on learners’ behaviour within a Learning Management System. These services allow the evaluator to easily track down the learners’ online behavior at specific milestones set up, gather feedback in an automatic way and present them in a comprehensive way. The innovation of the proposed set of services lies on the effort to adopt/adapt some of the web usage mining techniques combining them with the use of semantic description of networked learning tasks Keywords

Interaction analysis, networked learning design, understanding the learner's behavior

MOTIVATION

In a networked learning environment –usually supported by a Learning Management System (LMS), e.g. Moodle, Claorline, WebCT, etc.– lecturers often provide students with details of the course structure electronically, provide online course notes, make available presentations used during face to face lectures, give references for reading material. Learners are encouraged to use these resources and to engage in collaborative tasks where they have the opportunity to express ideas, discuss course topics. Learners can collaborate, share files and suggest ways of improving group deliverables in order to complete learning tasks collaboratively. Networked learning is much more ambitious than previous approaches of ICT-support in education. It is therefore more difficult to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the networked learning activities. Significant effort is required to provide systematic evaluation of networked learning environment.

(Soller et al., 2004) have proposed the collaboration management cycle to model the generic phases followed by a system (either a human or a tool) to analyse interaction in networked learning settings, giving emphasis on the analysis computer supported collaborative learning activities. For example, a teacher or evaluator assisted by automatic tools can observe the current state of learners’ interaction and provide feedback to correct those situations that are not positive for learning. For example, a tool can compute the indexes of participation in a forum of the members of a group. From the observation of these indexes, a teacher can make suggestions to individual members or to the group as a whole, in order to help them meet the desired criteria considered by that teacher. The first phase of the cycle is the collection of data about the interaction. This is a fundamental phase, as the type of data used as source configures the rest of the analysis.

Two main approaches to analysis of interaction can be distinguished: dialogue and action based approaches. Dialog-based approaches to analysis of interaction are the most popular ones, due to the high interest of the study of language as a means for knowledge construction. In spite of their popularity, dialogue-based Networked Learning 2006

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