Abstract
Analytics tools have been widely used over the last years for the development of web-based application and services. Analytics data allows improving user interfaces through planning, executing, and evaluating actions intended to increase user engagement. Measuring and improving user engagement in citizen science projects is not different from other web applications such as on-line shopping, newspapers, or sites for recommending music or movies. However, citizen science projects also aim to produce learning outcomes on the participants. Current analytics tools do not present sufficient information regarding user behaviour with the application, thus making measuring engagement and learning outcomes difficult. This paper presents the CCLTracker analytics framework that is intended to overcome current limitations in analytics tools, by providing an API for monitoring user activities such as time spent watching a video, time to complete a task, or how far down a page is scrolled. CCLTracker has been integrated in 3 different citizen science projects which have proved its value for measuring user engagement and learning.
Highlights
The explosion of web applications and on-line services over the last 20 years have highlighted the utility of analytics tools for understanding who the users are, how they find the website, and how they behave
Citizen science projects focus on two kind of indicators: (1) key performance indicators such as number of visitors, number of goals achieved, or number of clicks on links to external sources; and (2) key learning indicators such as accuracy of the task done, speed completing the task, % of tutorial and extra contents accessed, or participation in forums or chats
Engagement is another interesting aspect of the analytics data provided by the CCLTracker framework which has been frequently explored in citizen science research (Ponciano and Brazileiro, 2014; Kloetzer et al, 2017) (How much time a participant stays connected to the website, how often she gets back to it, or during which period of time)
Summary
The explosion of web applications and on-line services over the last 20 years have highlighted the utility of analytics tools for understanding who the users are, how they find the website, and how they behave. Monitoring key performance and learning indicators in a citizen science project requires monitoring user behaviour Both Google Analytics and Piwik allow sending application-specific events, i.e. events designed to be fired from the website when monitoring a user’s specific actions. We can add the number of clicks per session, the number of times a user writes on the forum, the clicks to internal and external links, whether the user is scrolling down the page or how much time a user has been watching a video All these examples require programming a tracking system in the client-side and connecting it with the analytics tool. This paper presents the CCLTracker analytics framework to ease monitoring user engagement and learning in citizen science projects, and overcome current limitations with analytics tool while reducing the implementation effort.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
