What Do Context Aware Electronic Alerts from Virtual Learning Environments Tell Us about User Time & Location?

The paper describes the analysis of user location and time stamp information automatically logged when students receive and interact with electronic updates from the University’s virtual learning environment. The electronic updates are sent to students’ mobile devices using RSS feeds. The mobile reception of such information can be received in three dimensions of context: time, location and activity. Fifteen students took part in this study with the three dimensions of context evenly distributed. The study aims to identify how users can engage with electronic updates related to teaching material, course work feedback, and general announcements from teaching staff across the University’s academic departments. As well as user profiling when reading the updates under these three dimensions of context, early investigations show that there exists peak times when users read these updates. All three dimensions exhibited a similar trend with activity being the highest. Initial results indicate that interactions occurred generally during office hours and within the confines of the campus environment, although uses of the activity based application were recorded also in informal locations outside of the working hours.