What the Literature and Instructors Say about the Analysis of Student Interaction Logs on Virtual Learning Environments

Abstract

Online education has broadened the avenues of research on student behavior and performance. In this paper, we shed light on how student interaction logs on virtual learning environments have been analyzed. We conducted two studies: interviews with instructors and a systematic mapping of 136 papers on Education Data Mining and Learning Analytics, published between 2010 and Feb/2019. Then, we triangulate the results between the instructors' answers and research results found in the mapping. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) an overview of Brazilian instructors' experience with Virtual Learning Environments and requirements to improve student analysis; (ii) an overview and classification of the papers in this topic; (iii) a ranking of importance of the instructors' main statements and paper results; and (iv) guidelines based on the requirements mentioned by instructors for designing tools that support their analyses. Finally, we discuss gaps in existing work that can ground and guide future research, such as tools to evaluate student interaction logs with video lectures and to analyze instructor interaction logs on Virtual Learning Environments.