Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Usage Cases: A Useful way to Improve Effectiveness of
eLearning web Based Platforms
Cristina Wanzeller 1 and Orlando Belo 2
1
Departamento de Informática, Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão e
CI&DETS, Instituto Politécnico de Viseu, Viseu, Portugal
2
Departamento de Informática, Escola de Engenharia, Universidade do Minho,
Braga, Portugal
cwanzeller@estv.ipv.pt
obelo@di.uminho.pt
Abstract: In this paper we propose a more effective use of the eLearning platforms resources, in order to
decrease the effort and time required to derive useful knowledge and bringing up together multiple valuable
contributions to overcome resource maintenance difficulties. The primary target of our work is the role of a Web
based platforms’ administrator (and promoter) that hasn’t enough experience on site optimization and resource
maintenance. Our idea to deal with this challenge is to assist such tasks, providing a system that acquires and
reuses the knowledge gained from the experience in solving problems concerning administration activities. The
system explores the case-based reasoning approach to accomplish its duty of suggesting a suited solution for
particular usage data analysis problem, on an eLearning Web based platform, as well, supporting the collecting
and structuring of the knowledge contained on successful solved usage problems. We describe the system and
propose its application to the specific domain of eLearning Web based platforms optimization. We are specifically
engaged in facilitating the collection and cataloguing of knowledge in this area, so it can be shared, evaluated
and finally reused in new situations.
Keywords: eLearning web based platforms, web usage mining, clickstream analysis, case-based reasoning,
web usage analysis, eLearning platforms optimization
1. Introduction
Web based eLearning platforms are very common and important. Currently the goal is to improve and
maximize their potential. Like any other web site, such platforms must realise their mission.
Nevertheless, implementing and administrating Web sites are tasks very difficult to accomplish in an
effective manner. The experience tells us that eLearning Web sites’ usage differs very often from
expectations, demanding deep decision support to define and apply some improvements and
refinements. Therefore knowing and understanding users’ behaviour is strategic to achieve site goals,
perceiving the impact of its structure, and to maximize the potentialities of the platforms and
guaranteeing their success. Web Usage Mining (WUM) technology can help us in a significant way to
reach such goals. With it, we can develop and apply Knowledge Discovery (KD) or Data Mining (DM)
processes to data related with the interaction activity between users and eLearning platforms, using
information about the usage of all the resources available to them. Yet, WUM doesn’t provide itself a
solution with the ability to answer to the most critical issues about the obsolescence of resources. It
neither assures KD process effectiveness.
Past experience in WUM is strategic and vital to the success of the site evaluation process. To
acquire such experience and use it latter in site restructuring processes, we decided to catalogue and
store WUM past experiences, in a specific oriented knowledge base that could be applied over usage
data analysis. The Case Based Reasoning (CBR) paradigm provides us the necessary means to
create and maintain our knowledge base. Its methods favour a flexible similarity based comparison,
even if the involved features are not objective and precisely defined. CBR can cope with incomplete
and subjective information and makes possible to consider only the relevant features and to use
specific importance levels, increasing the potential of answering the real user’s needs. The intuitive
nature of usage cases as knowledge representation and the sustained ability to learn incrementally
can reduce significantly the knowledge acquisition and the maintenance efforts related to eLearning
platforms organization and resources.
WUM potential (Rafaeli and Ravid, 1997) and application (Zaiane 2001; Pahl 2004; Lu 2004) to
eLearning environments was proposed for long time. Now educational DM is a prominent direction of
active research (Romero and Ventura 2007; Herhskovitz and Nachmias 2009). Still, the idea of mixing
WUM and CBR, in order to assist Web based eLearning systems enhancement is unusual. CBR is
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