Social Navigation Support in E-Learning: What are the Real Footprints?

Social navigation support is a new approach for helping users to find their way through complex navigation-based environments of hypermedia by following the “footprints” of other users. A significant challenge to social navigation support encounters is to construct a trail of beneficial footprints. Traditional social navigation support considers the user clicks to be “footprints.” However, in our work we have found that simple click-based footprints lack information about the true intention of the users. We evaluated the benefit of considering time spent reading each page when calculating “footprints” for social navigation support. In this paper, we present a discussion of the possible problems with simple click-based footprints and the advantages of adding the measurement of time spent on pages into the footprints. We have studied this in an educational application, which helps students find relevant information in online tutorials, in the domain of Cprogramming.