Abstract:

Online support documentation (http://sweet.ua.pt/pedrocruz/bioestatistica/) has been built since 2019 for our course of Biostatistics at University of Aveiro. It has been done to better support study by complementing traditional slide presentations and a book of exercises. Our course targets more than 180 students from the first year of the degrees of Biology, Geology and Biology, and Marine Sciences.

Last year, 28 students, out of 180, replied to an anonymous inquiry and a complementary interview was conducted with 5 chosen students. We could conclude that the development of the online support documentation should continue but improvements are needed (for instance, increasing the level of details in online texts).

To get a complementary view on how the biostatistics online support documentation is used by students, a new approach is carried out. In 2020/2021 academic year, we have automatically collected data usage using "Google Analytics 4" (GA4). The website, holding the support documentation, is a tree-like structure with chapters and sections and each section is a web page that can be of two types: a "concept" section or an individual "exercise" section.

GA4 collects, for each web page:
(1) the web page title;
(2) the number of interactions;
(3) the mean time spent in all interactions with a web page in the period of study. An interaction (also called "User engagement") is issued by GA4 when a user has the web page in focus for at least one second. Additionally, two more columns were added to data:
(4) the type of the web page: concept or exercise;
(5) the chapter number (1 to 6 chapters).

We present statistical insights about how the online support documentation was used in 2022/June when students had two formal tests about chapters 4 and then chapters 5 and 6. A brief summary of this findings is as follows:
(1) as expected by the common experience, usage of web pages increased before assessments;
(2) in chapters 4 and 5, the "number of interactions", obtained for a web page, and the "mean time spent", obtained for the same web page, are positively correlated suggesting there are some more important web pages in the learning process;
(3) Concerning the mean time spent, its distribution is more skewed to the right for exercise web pages than for conceptual web pages.

It could mean that the mean time spent on exercise web pages shows high variability because students look more for suggestions on the "how to do it" or to “confirm their solution” to a certain exercise.

Keywords:

Online documentation-based learning, biostatistics, Google Analytics 4.