Usage Patterns Discovery from a Web Log in an Indian E-Learning Site: A Case Study

An important research area in education and technology is how the learners use e-learning. By exploring the various factors and relationships between them, we can get an insight into the learners' behaviors for delivering tailored e-content required by them. Although many tools exist to record detailed navigational activities, they don't explore the learners' usage patterns for an adaptive e-learning site. The previous web log data analyses, done so far, have been very limited in their scope as they lack detailed empirical results on the learning technology usage. This paper discusses the detailed results of a case study of web data mining in a specific e-learning application. The main objective of this study is to conduct research on usability and effectiveness of the e-content by analyzing the web log. For this, a suitable data set was retrieved from raw web log records, to which various web mining and statistical techniques could be applied. We have evaluated different features of e-content that can lead to better learning outcomes for the learners, by understanding their navigational behaviors, their interaction with system and their area of interest. We found, for example, what sequence of topics were the most liked and the least liked by the learners; we also found that these patterns lead us to hypothesize the correlation and regression analysis between the average time, test score and total attempts.