Abstract:

In the last decade, the development of authoring systems for web based trainings (WBT) focused on features especially for the trainees in the context of the fast changing web, such as responsive design and social features. But what are the needs of the trainer, except to make the content production more efficient? This is the analysis of these new diversity of learning processes (Learning Analytics).

The main idea of this paper is to take advantage of this information by providing it to the author of the WBT to create insights right there where the content was produced. How would an author revise his content, if he know one page of his WBT was never visited by an user, has been liked 300 times or shared by many people? Is there a need to generate specialized content based on the target system (desktop or smartphone), such as providing different media or text lengths?

We present a concept for an in-place content monitor, which will be integrated in an existing authoring system to improve the authoring process and therefore the quality of the content. The status quo of our authoring system is composed out of three components: An authoring studio (desktop application), a distribution portal (server application) and a content player (client application). The output of the authoring studio is a SCORM (http://scorm.com) compatible zip archive. Due to limitations and restrictions of SCORM, the gathered information of using the WBT inside a learning management system (LMS) or in combination with independent social networks, cannot be stored using only SCORM.

So we propose the usage of a central information hub, which serves as a data provider in every case or scenario. Technically, this hub is based on a Learning Record Store (LRS) as part of the Experience API, also known as Tin Can API (http://tincanapi.com). A prototypical implementation is integrated in our authoring studio. The gathered information is displayed as an overlay over the corresponding content (pages or parts of the page, including videos, images or questions). We experimented with different types of visualizations regarding the in-place content monitor and assembled content specific packages for the author.

On the long term, we plan to add even more statistics and visualizations. The reporting tool could e.g. summarize duration and paths of the user, actions per visit or audience retention in videos. Based on this in-place feedback, the author can create new views of the content, which will address special learning scenarios or needs of the users.

Keywords:

e-learning, Web 2.0, web-based training (WBT), authoring system, learning analytics, LernBar.