Determining Website Usage Time from Interactions: Data Preparation and Analysis

With the widespread adoption of the Web in tertiary education, students often work in electronic environments away from the direct observation of their educators. It is therefore of critical importance to develop techniques that will inform educators about how their students are using these new environments. A useful metric for gaining an understanding of student use of a Website is the time they spend using the site. This may be determined from captured and recorded student interactions with the Website. However, Website interactions present a large collection of data in a format that is difficult to handle. Using this data to determine access times is not a trivial task and several stages of preprocessing need to be performed. This article presents a method to prepare and analyse Website interaction data to determine site access times. Interactions captured from a courseware Website are used to illustrate this technique. This study has provided valuable information about student use of the site to the educators, informing future enhancements and developments to the Website.