Abstract
During the last few years, learning analytics (LA) has gained the interest of researchers in the field of education. Generally, LA is related with the development of methods that use educational data sets to support the learning process. Therefore, there is a need understanding how learners, educators, and institutions can best support this process. Thus, a framework is presented that tries to extend the collaborative three-dimensional virtual environments for educational by integrating a LA tool. The aim is to help the teacher to monitor and evaluate the students' learning process in these types of environments. It is the intention include a (1) comprehensive analysis of the currently available LA tools for educational, (2) design of a user-centered framework based the requirements gathered from the analysis, and (3) thorough evaluation of framework to allow identify possible behavior patterns of students within the environment, related to your preferences for materials and expertise.
TopIntroduction
In recent years, there has been a great technological evolution that has allowed a change in the way of working in various areas of society, namely in education. At this level, different technologies have been applied to create new ways of teaching, communicating, and representing knowledge, benefiting from the advantages that these technological resources offer.
Teaching goes beyond the classroom, leading teachers to think about new learning strategies. Among the existing solutions, there are the three-dimensional virtual environments, which can be used as a support for carrying out collaborative activities between students. However, although these environments have peculiar characteristics, such as a sense of immersion, a sense of presence, communication and interactivity, which assist teachers and students in carrying out the proposed educational activities, they do not have components that allow monitoring and recording all actions carried out by students throughout their learning process. In order to minimize this gap, we propose a framework that integrates a learning analytics tool with a collaborative, three-dimensional virtual educational environment developed under a platform for the development of virtual worlds. The objective of this framework is to assist the teacher in assessing the performance of each student, helping him to visualize the entire learning process, through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data, from the students' interactions in the three-dimensional collaborative virtual environment.
From a technological point of view, framework will use the Opensource platform, called OpenSim, which allows the development of immersive and private three-dimensional environments and allows connection to MySQL database. All actions performed by students will be recorded in database, using a scripting language, called OSSL (OpenSimulator Scripting Language).
Based on these premises, the first part of the chapter will introduce the reader the concepts related to three-dimensional collaborative virtual environments, and the technological infrastructure used for the development of the collaborative three-dimensional virtual environment (OpenSim), will be characterized. In the second part, a brief description of the Learning Analytics concept and how it can bring advantages in the improvement and performance of students will be made. In the third part there will be a short explanation about each of the most popular learning analytics tools. Subsequently, it will be explained how the framework will be developed, presenting its architecture and the way of extracting data from the database. Finally, the last part will comprise the evaluation of the framework throughout its development, where a set of quality criteria will be applied.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Framework Design: The basic structure that allow organizing the overall all design flow into a set of steps.
Learning Analytics: An evidence-based approach that from data generated by students as they learn, to allow are measured and analysis for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs.
Privacy: Related to with students because the aim is to analyse the information extracted in their learning process.
User-Centered Design: Iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process.
Weka: Learning analytics tools which contains some visualization tools and machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks.
Collaborative Learning: The interaction between students that allow to engage in group the students to enhance learning through working together. They work together to solve problems or learn new concepts.
OpenSim: Open-source multi-platform where we can create complex 3D environments and includes facilities for creating custom avatars, chatting with others in the environment, building 3D content in world.
Evaluation: Systematic process of collecting, analysing, and interpreting information. In this chapter the evaluation is related with evaluation of framework whose purpose the measure the final quality of environment based on some quality criteria.
Virtual Environments: Open environments that lead the participants to browse through different scenarios at random.