When Data Exploration and Data Mining meet while Analysing Usage Data of a Course

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are web-based systems that are increasingly used in education. If lecturers want to gain a deeper insight on whether and how students use the learning resources they put at their disposal in a course, user data stored by the LMS needs to be explored. To help explore these data, we have designed and implemented an application called ExtractAndMap [1] that structures and exports all data stored at various places and under various forms by a LMS into a consistent data base that can be used for numerous queries and further data mining. Using queries on the data base it is possible to answer questions like: “how many students have attempted self-evaluation exercise of week 1?”, “how many students have attempted self-evaluation exercise of week 2?” and so on, till the end of the semester. When looking at the results it may well be that these numbers diminish as shown in Figure 3 p. 7 in [1].