Comparative Social Visualization for Personalized E-learning

Social learning has confirmed its value in enhancing the learning outcomes across a wide spectrum. To support social learning, visual approach is a common technique to represent and organize multiple students’ data in an informative way. This paper presents a design of comparative social visualization for E-learning, which encourages information discovery and social comparisons. Classroom studies confirmed the motivational impact of personalized social guidance provided by the visualization in the target context. The visualization encouraged students to do some work ahead of the course schedule. Moreover, class leaders provided an implicit social guidance for the rest of the class and successfully led the way to discover most relevant resources creating good trails for the rest of the class. We summarized the evidence of students’ engagement and performance through the social visualization interface. The paper finally concluded a set of attributes for social visualization in E-learning by a user study with a group of 23 students. We discussed the general implications from our findings and how they can be used to inform the design of social visualizations for personalized E-learning.