Analysis of interaction logs for online tutorials (abstract only)

As the use of online interactive tutorials becomes more widespread, there will be more opportunities to use fine-grained interaction log data to deduce student behavior. Log data can help debug usability or pedagogical problems with the tutorials, or guide redesign to discourage pedagogically poor student behavior. OpenDSA is a collection of open source interactive materials for teaching data structures and algorithms. We present a case study analysis of the activity logs from use of OpenDSA tutorials by roughly 150 students over several weeks. We identified clusters of student use based on when they completed exercises, verified the reliability of estimated time requirements for exercises, provided evidence that a majority of students do not read the text, and found evidence that students complete additional exercises after obtaining credit. Furthermore, we determined that slideshow use was fairly high, but that skipping to the end of slideshows was common.