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G. Rakoczi, M. Pohl:
"Eye Tracking Study of the E-Learning Environment Moodle: Investigation of User Behavior";
Talk: IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2009), Rom; 2009-11-20 - 2009-11-22; in: "Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2009)", Dr. Kinshuk, D. Sampson, M. Spector, P. Isaias, D. Ifenthaler (ed.); IADIS Press, (2009), ISBN: 978-972-8924-95-9; 466 - 469.

This work describes an eye tracking study of the e-learning system Moodle outlining how Moodle´s learning materials
are explored, selected and processed. The goal of this study was to investigate several cognitive variables and the
exploratory learning processes itself. The experiment addressed research objectives such as the individual order of
selecting learning material, the visual scanning of Moodle's environment, the importance of "Gestalt laws" respectively
rules of pre-attentive perception, the influence of the involvement-factor as well as usability aspects.
Discussion and analysis of the collected survey data indicate some interesting results. The investigation indentified that
first fixations of a Moodle page basically reveal a sort of `inventory´ of informative elements and that visual perceptionrules
highly structure participant´s exploration. Moreover involvement measurements implied that learners with `high´
involvement tend to process teaching material uniformly, whereas participants of the category `low´ adopt noticeably
irregular fixation-densities, due to intentional skipping of content or monotone reading.

Eye-tracking, e-learning, user-behavior, Gestalt laws, Moodle, usability

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_182718.pdf