Output Data Information - Sessions

Learner Sessions

ELAT considers a session as an ordered series of events where a student or learner interacts with the edX learning system, from the moment the student opens the course homepage, every interaction such as a mouse click to open a lesson, then a video or a quiz, with every pause or every answer, respectively. A session ends when the student closes the element they were interacting with, or after a long period of inactivity, this is currently 30 minutes.

Why use sessions?

The use of sessions is common for log tracking analysis, since the records in logfiles are only isolated events, a real notion of student’s engagement can be obtained from their behavior during a period of interaction: a session.

Database Details: Session Types

Once ELAT has processed all the logfiles, the sessions are stored in the database according to the schema adapted from the MOOCdb Model. Each of the following session types is also a table in the database, and can be downloaded for further analysis.

  • Session: This is the general session, it consist only of the session_id, course_learner_id, start_time, end_time and duration. The session starts when the student opens any element related to the course, and it continues throughout the whole interaction, for example, the student may watch a video, go to ask a question in the forum and then solve a quiz. The session, as well as all other types of sessions, ends when the video is closed, or after the mentioned inactivity period.
  • Video Interaction: The video session starts when a video element is opened, and it comprises session_id, course_learner_id, start_time, end_time, duration, video_id, times_pause, duration_pause, times_speed_up, times_speed_down, times_forward_seek, duration_forward_seek, times_backward_seek and duration_backward_seek.
  • Forum Session: These sessions involve the time spent in forums, reading and searching for posts, but not actually posting anything. The stored values are session_id, course_learner_id, start_time, end_time, duration, times_search and relevant_item_id
  • Forum Interaction: These are different to Forum Sessions, because they are not a series of events over time, but the single action of a user posting something in a forum course_learner_id, post_id, post_title, post_content, post_type, post_timestamp, post_thread_id and post_parent_id
  • Quiz Questions: The list of questions in a course, can be used together with Submissions question_id, question_type, question_weight and question_due
  • Quiz Session: Simply the time spent in a quiz element of the course session_id, course_learner_id, start_time, end_time and duration
  • Submission: Isolated action of a learner submitting an answer to a question course_learner_id, submission_id, question_id and submission_timestamp
  • Assessment: The result of an assessment course_learner_id, assessment_id, grade and max_grade