An Information Visualization-Based Approach for Exploring Databases

Learning Management Systems (LMS) may use Information Visualization techniques and concepts for presenting their large amounts of data, in order to ease the monitoring and analysis of students learning process problems. Nonetheless, the generally adopted approaches are based on presenting data obtained by predefined database queries only, which does not consider unforeseen situations derived from final user's knowledge about e-learning domain. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to provide a resource for LMS users to define and execute queries related to these unforeseen situations. This resource is a prototype by which users may access a remote LMS database, create their own queries by selecting database attributes they want to analyze, and represent query results by means of automatically selected interactive graphical representations. User evaluations indicate that the approach is appropriate and points out possible enhancements.