Analytical Tools for Visualisation of Interactions in Online E-learning Activities on Lms and Semantic Similarity Measures on Text

This paper aims to build an analytical tools system for Learning Management Systems (LMS) that will aid and support teachers and administrators to understand and analyse interaction patterns and knowledge constructions of the participants involved in ongoing online interactions. Most LMS commercial or open source software does not include any tools for comprehensive access tracking and log analysis capabilities They also lack the support for many aspects specific to evaluating participation level , analysing interactions , visually representing ongoing interactions , analysing of the content of messages Semantic .It is difficult and time consuming for the teachers and the educationalists to determine the number of participants, non-participants and lurkers in ongoing discussion. Our analytical tools take a novel approach of using Web log data generated by Learning management systems (LMS) to help instructors become aware of what is happening in distance learning classes. The measure of semantic similarity between texts used in our system, to find out the degree of relation between the messages. It gives the value of relevance in numerical format. The semantic similarity of text utilises WordNet as an underlying ontology for calculating semantic similarity. WordNet is a lexical database for English Language. It is organized as a network which consists of concepts or terms called Synsets (list of synonyms terms) and the relationship between them. There are different types of relationship existing in WordNet such as; is-a, part-of, synonym and antonym. The proposed methods can be used in a variety of applications that involve text knowledge representation and discovery.