Keeping Tracks of Users’ Activities on Discussion Forum: Reflection and Proposal

Forums for discussion are one of asynchronous communication tools that have been widely employed in all platforms of distance learning as important means for communications between learners, and between learners and instructors. Assisting forum users during and after their communications and providing them more useful information on their activities are our research interests. We present in this article our research works, which mainly focus on how to finely track the user’s communication activity on the discussion forums. We state the potential elements of problems in keeping tracks of the user's activities while using the discussion forums and in exploiting the collected tracking data. We present next the approach for building the tracking system, applicable on different discussion forums. An example of how the collected tracking data are being analyzed and visualized in order to help the participants in the learning process, is also included.