Designing Generic Visualisations for Activity Log Data

Especially in lifelong or professional learning, the picture of a continuous learning analytics process emerges. In this process, het- erogeneous and changing data source applications provide data relevant to learning, at the same time as questions of learners to data change. This reality challenges designers of analytics tools, as it requires ana- lytics tools to deal with data and analytics tasks that are unknown at application design time. In this paper, we describe a generic visualiza-Tion tool that addresses these challenges by enabling the visualization of any activity log data. Furthermore, we evaluate how well participants can answer questions about underlying data given such generic versus custom visualizations. Study participants performed better in 5 out of 10 tasks with the generic visualization tool, worse in 1 out of 10 tasks, and without significant difference when compared to the visualizations within the data-source applications in the remaining 4 of 10 tasks. The experiment clearly showcases that overall, generic, standalone visualiza-Tion tools have the potential to support analytical tasks sufficiently well.