But the question is:
- What did we do to be accepted in this great conference?
It is an easy answer! We tried to explain how we proceed with our first attempt to answer one of the research questions:
- How can we help users to drive conclusions in a generic way?
We thought that term of learning goals could be nice. But what does learning goal means? It is a more difficult question... so we decided to reduce a bit the abstraction level of the word. Let's call it "Goal". What can be a goal? Everything that means achievement... a milestone in the course can be a goal? Sure! And if a students want to spent more or less time focused on an application, is it a goal? Yes! Sure! What am I trying to explain here? That we keep this word a bit away of the pedagogical formal meaning.
We got some inspiration from tools such as Rescuetime, Wakoopa, RunKeeper, JoggyCoach,... applications more oriented to the behavior rather than an abstracted goal. And why? For instance, in RecueTime, you can set up goals such as I want to be more productive! And you start to track your activity... but how RescueTime calculates your activity? They have a classification that scores every application as a productive or non productive... so browsing is not a productive application. It means that you can be editing a deliverable in google docs and you are not productive... sorry dude! You are wasting your time doing such deliverable... ;) Luckily, this classification is customizable... but anyway... blogging can be a non-productive tool and productive depending of the purpose... And It is really difficult to track... but also difficult to get input every time from the user that changes the focus to another application. So let's decrease the level of complexity and we ask:
Do the goals of the course help to contextualize the visualizations?
We developed this dashboard:
We developed a dashboard with visualizations of activity data. The overall goal of this dashboard is to enable students to reflect on their own activity and compare it with their peers. The time spent with different tools, websites and Eclipse IDE documents are tracked by RescueTime and the Rabbit Eclipse plug-in. The collected information is displayed in a dashboard containing goal-oriented visualizations. In the visualizations, the students can filter by different criteria, such as course goals and dates. Such filters allow contextualization of the visualized data for the user. Linking the visualizations with the learning goals can help students and teachers to assess whether the goal has been achieved.
In this course, the students have to develop software and go through the different phases of software development process, such as design, programming and reporting. To this end, they use tools such as LibreOffice, the Eclipse IDE and Mozilla Firefox. They have to share tasks and responsibilities between group members. Controlling the risks and evolution of such tasks is part of the assignment.
Visualization 1 are the goals during the course that can also be defined as milestones. Green color is that the time has expired and blue is that currently is going on.
Visualization 2 is a motion chart where x is the activity of the user and axis y is the average of the members of the team.
Visualization 3 is a timeline that visualizes the time spent on the different activities. To classify this activity we use the Rescuetime taxonomy that the site provides.
Visualization 4 is a barchart that visualizes the same than the previous one but visulized with the total activity.
Visualization 5 is a timeline that visualizes the time spent on the concrete tool.
Visualization 6 is a barchart that compares your activity with the total activity of the group.
Visualization 7 is a barchart that show the time spent on the different document on your Eclipse.
Finally, visualization 8 visualizes the time spent on the different websites.
At the beginning of this month we attended the Quantified Self conference in Amsterdam and there we learn something that was relatively useful... an easy way to present our results answering three simple questions:
- What did you do?
- How did you do it?
- What did you learn?
We have explained more or less the first two questions but...
What did we learn?
The perceived usefulness by the users is good but they don't use the application. It points out that we are doing something wrong... maybe the problem is that we don't stimulate enough the students... there are a behavior model that describes when the people modify their behavior. People needs triggers that motivate the change and the ability of the people to do the action. In this website, Fogg describes Facebook as a good trigger generator... for instance, when someone is tagged in a photo and receives the notification, automatically s/he connects to facebook to see the photo. Maybe this is some of the topics that we should explore...
How can we motivate the students to use learning analytic tools?
And tomorrow a bit more! What we are currently working and future plans!
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