Supporting Student Engagement Through Explorable Visual Narratives

This paper introduces VisEN, a novel visual narrative framework that has been shown to facilitate, support, and enhance student engagement in an adaptive Online Learning Environment (OLE). VisEN provides explorable visual narratives personalized to students in order to support them in engaging with course content. The evaluation of VisEN showed that the explorable visual narratives encouraged the majority of ‘improving engagement students’, that completed the Information Management and Data Engineering module as part of their undergraduate degree, to engage with assigned activities, and subsequently these learners enhanced their engagement levels. Visualizations have been used in OLEs to support students by presenting student data. Information Visualization research has demonstrated the value of visual narratives in communicating a message, by highlighting facts and making the message more memorable. In addition, visual data exploration can support users in understandings the message. However, in OLEs, explorable visual narratives have not been used to date to support student engagement or to guide learners through a message that they could explore and understand. This paper evaluates the impact that explorable visual narratives had on student course engagement during two successive academic years.