Evaluation of eye movements: How do students percieve teaching materials within Moodle?

How do students perceive teaching materials within Moodle? Which type of elements do they fixate first? How do students perceive images compared to text elements? How does the complexity of a teaching material influence eye movements and subsequently the learning process with Moodle? To which extent does student’s involvement influence eye movements during learning? ... This paper outlines how teaching material is ‘seen’ within pages of Moodle. The underlying experiment was carried out as a eye tracking study conducted among Austrian students. The investigation addressed the following research questions: Discussion and analysis of the collected eye tracking data indicate some interesting results. The investigation indentified for example that difficult texts generate higher fixations as well as intense eye movements, which in succession cause decreasing of student’s reading rate. Moreover distinctive eye tracking fixation patterns were detected indicating complicate information– extraction of learning materials. As a further example, involvement measurements implied that learners with ‘high’ involvement tend to process teaching material uniformly, whereas participants of the category ‘low’ adopt noticeably irregular fixation-densities, due to intentional skipping of content or monotone reading. To sum up, all the findings are subsumed in ‘Seven Recommendations’ (see section 4) that support effective presenting of teaching material within Moodle.