Engagement of Students in Data Visualization for the Purpose of E-Learning Improvement

Abstract

The study describes an approach to e-learning based on the Moodle platform that is used to visualize participation in the learning community and is proposed to be used to inform students and teachers about their involvement in the social learn-ing environment. The experiment involved 5 teachers and 3 experts who deter-mined the most significant visualization indicators for the virtual learning envi-ronment dashboards. There were 42 students aged 21 to 23. The virtual learning environment is based on the Moodle and Blackboard platforms that are common-ly used in universities. SocialWall allowed participants to perform actions in the social environment that are visualized in graphs under the specified criteria. A Wiki repository plugin was also added in order to accumulate student knowledge in shared structured documents stored in a shared repository. The relational data-base management system MySQL allows creation of additional relations, data-base design and administration. The visualization activities described in the study are based on modified state transition networks to analyze and visualize the stu-dent learning path. Student trajectory networks show the interaction of individual learners or groups with the course structure and material.