VisEN: Motivating Learner Engagement Through Explorable Visual Narratives

Visualizations are increasingly being used to present student interactions and progress with online learning environments as motivations for student engagement with course content. Specifically, visualizations supporting data exploration and peer comparisons have yielded positive results in engagement. In addition, visual narratives have recently started to be used in learning environments to engage learners. This paper introduces VisEN, a visualization framework for semi-automatically constructing explorable visual narratives. VisEN was used during two successive academic years to construct individualized explorable visual narratives for undergraduate learners participating in an online Information Management course. The narratives presented engagement scores, time spent on activities and peer comparisons. This research evaluates the impact the explorable visual narratives had on student course engagement. This paper shows that the explorable visual narratives encouraged the majority of students (that were engaging poorly with course content) to engage with assigned tasks, and subsequently these students improved their engagement levels.