Cast your Eyes on Moodle: An Eye Tracking Study investigating learning with Moodle

This work describes an eye tracking study of Moodle outlining how Moodle’s components and teaching materials are ‘seen’ by Moodle users. In order to investigate navigation schemes, usability aspects as well as the learning process itself, Austrian students were eye-tracked during using Moodle. The study addressed objectives to find out about user’s visual scanning of Moodle’s environment identifying hereby core navigation strategies and components that highly affect exploration within Moodle’s pages. Discussion and analysis of the collected eye tracking data indicate some interesting results. For example, the investigation identified that the breadcrumb navigation and the “My courses”-block were most frequently used for navigation, but lots of students still use the browser’s ‘back’button. Eye tracking results also demonstrated that some users had remarkable difficulties locating Moodle’s logout button as well as their profile page. The study also tried to draw conclusions for future development. Within this work recommendations are given contributing to development of an effective as well as intuitive user interface for Moodle 2.0. Implications are stated describing how users might use new navigation elements of Moodle 2.0 beta. The major part of my presentation is to mediate how students actually ‘see’ and work with Moodle. For teachers (in particular) pointing out which elements are preferred during the learning process is highly relevant for efficient teaching. However, findings of this eye tracking study support not only teachers also developers and other Moodle users will benefit. Better understanding of Moodle’s user interface and the learning process within Moodle might improve quality of use.