A Comparative Study on the Analysis of Students Interactions in e-Learning

Can e-learning systems effectively provide useful information to help teachers prevent students dropping out and failing as well as other access patterns useful to improve the pace of teaching? We present the data resulting from the analysis of a series of university courses in two different universities, one in Madrid, Spain, and the other one in London, United Kingdom. In order to do so, we have collected data from October 2006 to July 2007 from 400 students from 6 different courses interacting one way or the other with their e-learning platform. Thus, in these two countries a different e-learning tracking system was used to obtain the information about access; in the first one, an Ad-hoc Tracking System called Merlin placed in an in house e-learning system, and in the second one, the standard Blackboard tracking system was used.