Investigating educational attractors and life tracks in e-learning environments using formal concept analysis

Abstract

E-learning platforms are widely used in modern education. While in the traditional education the instructor does not have a comprehensive insight on how his students are using the educational resources, the situation is different for online learning environments. Web usage logs comprise a variety of information regarding the visited pages. These web-logs become a rich resource for data analysis. Understanding usage patterns from web-logs is widely used in order to improve web-based applications. In our research we are interested in distilling valuable knowledge on users behavior in online educational platforms using the knowledge discovery and processing methods of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). This knowledge can then be used to understand how students are using the educational resources, to gain insight on their online behavior as well as how they use these resources over time. In this paper, we focus on the detection of behavioral patterns in web-based e-learning environments and on how users adhere to intended educational attractors. For this, we first use FCA to investigate so-called educational attractors and then distill users life tracks using Temporal Concept Analysis. We exemplify the developed methods on a locally developed e-learning platform called PULSE.