Only relevant links between nodes have been drawn.
A link is relevant when the percentage of students that
follow such link is at least a 5% for both nodes. No-
tice that this graph includes all the possible paths, that
is, not only the first action taken from the initial page.
5 CONCLUSION
In this paper a proposal for embedding hidden marks
in web pages with the aim of user action identifica-
tion has been proposed. Two complementary mark-
ing strategies have been described: the first one, ac-
tion based, consists in adding special parameters in
the calls to applications in the business logics layer of
a web site, in order to capture the specific clicks in
the relevant elements for analysis purposes. The sec-
ond one, content based, consists in hiding invisible
pieces of content that, combined with simple scripts,
generate log entries for both user actions and navi-
gation paths. Preliminary results show that this ap-
proach is useful to face both well known problems
when analyzing large and complex web sites. First,
users’s intentions are better captured as only the rele-
vant actions (for analysis purposes) are logged. Sec-
ond, generated data are only a small fraction of the
original data stored in the web server log files, thus re-
ducing both time and space requirements for off-line
processing. A simple experiment showing user be-
havior the first day of the academic semester has been
described. This experiment reveals interesting infor-
mation, for example, students start sessions reading
all the welcome messages from the teacher and other
students, and replying such messages. This fact could
be used to design a specific initial page for the first
session during first day, when all the other available
services are not requested. Similar ideas for improv-
ing the e-learning environment can be extracted from
the results of each activity analysis, depending on the
educational context.
Current and future research in this topic should in-
clude the use of large scale web usage mining tech-
niques for clustering purposes. Analyzing the evolu-
tion of users’ behavior along a period of time is also
an interesting issue. Finally, as web services are be-
coming more “semantic”, it will be important to es-
tablish the appropriate relationships between the new
services available in the virtual campus and real user
intentions when searching or browsing such services.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been partially supported by a Span-
ish government grant under the project PERSONAL
(TIN2006-15107-C02-01).
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