(SpringerBriefs in Business Process Management) Learning Analytics Cookbook_ How to Support Learning Processes Through Data Analytics and Visualizatio

78 7 Understanding Students’ Online Behavior While They Search on the Internet:...
Fig. 7.1 Glossary interface
7.3.2 The Glossary
The glossary tool was designed to meet the needs of students who are studying to
become interpreters. In LearnWeb, a glossary is a database that the system considers
to be a type of resource that is on a par with images, videos, and text files. All of the
data that users enter, along with their actions, such as viewing, adding, editing, and
deleting entries, are logged and stored in a relational database with a time stamp.
A glossary can host an infinite number of entries, each of which is composed of at
least two terms: the source term and its translation into the target language. Synonyms
in the source and target languages may be added, so each glossary entry
contains two or more terms. Each term in a glossary entry is accompanied by a series
of attributes that correspond to given fields in the glossary interface; these attributes
enrich the term with optional data. Currently, the glossary is set for the English-
Italian language pair, but it can easily be adjusted for other language pairs.
LearnWeb glossaries can be filled in and consulted bidirectionally (e.g., from
English into Italian and vice versa), can be personal and/or collaborative, and can be
shared with other students/users. More details about the use of the glossary are in
Sect. 7.5 (Serving learning analytics). Figure 7.1 shows the glossary interface for
entering a new entry.
7.3.3 The Proxy
The main challenge in tracking users’ Internet activities is that web servers’ log files
are usually accessible only to the server’s owner. For example, the operator of a
Moodle instance can easily log every request a user makes to his or her system, but