An Activity Tracking Infrastructure for Embedded Open Educational Labs Supporting the Needs of Lab Owners and Students

Remote labs are interactive Open Educational Resources, where user’s action generates a wealth of data belonging to two categories: interaction data resulting from the use of the client web app, and experimental data resulting from performing the experiment. Many entities are interested in deriving insights from the user’s generated data: students, teachers, institutions, and lab providers. In this work we consider to needs of students and lab owners as stakeholders. Through questionnaires we find out that students want to save and retrieve their experimental results and have awareness about their progress relative to others, while lab owners want to understand how their labs are used in order to provide better services and advertise their labs. Given that students and lab owners have different interests in the data, we address their differing needs by proposing an architecture for an activity tracking infrastructure, an accompanying vocabulary to formalize the tracks, and present a use case.