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

Résumé En

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.