Informing The Design of a Course Data Visualisator: an Empirical Study

Instructors have less understanding of their students when teaching at distance than when teaching in classrooms. Course management systems facilitate the delivery of distance courses but provide very little help to instructors to gain understanding of cognitive and social processes in distance classes. This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the instructors' needs when teaching at distance using course management systems. The aim of the study is to identify what kind of student information instructors require in their activities and to inform the design of a system to support distance learning instructors.