There’s nothing more fascinating for an e-learning course designer than watching users interact with the courses online. From where they click, their mouse movements, scrolling and so on, you can tell you a lot about what is good and what is bad about the course and the user interface surrounding it.

The problem for e-learning, of course, is that you can’t sit there and watch students interact with your courses. They’re usually on a browser far away, and it’s hard to work out what they’re doing. “Usability testing” under these circumstances is difficult.

People are trying to remedy the situation, of course.

There are some commercial companies that take these techniques and use them for business analytics and marketing. Crazyegg, of instance, take a visual approach to showing where users have clicked, what sites they have been referred from, and so on. It’s a nice, user friendly way to see what bits of your course generate interest and so on. Here’s one view Crazy Egg provide - a “heatmap”. The brighter the colour, the more clicks the user has made in the area.

Clicktale take another approach. They actually track user movements so you can watch “playback” of the user’s session. Scrolling, mouse movement and so on. The orange block moves around the screen to show where the user is moving the mouse. A very handy technique - it means you can really “see” what students are up to and improve things where necessary.

Back in 2001, a MIT project called “Cheese” did something along the lines in a marginally more primitive way using embedded script in the browser. Another open source, free way of doing something similar is by using something such as UsaProxy. Richard Atterer and Albrecht Schmidt, the creators of the software, put it this way:

We have implemented a special proxy server which sits transparently between server and client. It gathers detailed usage information (e.g. key presses, mouse movements), including information on the objects on the page which were involved in an interaction.

This allows you to share sessions with users, log mouse movements and so on. The basic idea and some of the techniques can be easily adapted for e-learning and course usability testing. Once presented as a report, a “movie” of user activity or a heatmap, or even just watched “live”, this sort information is a great way to see how your e-learning project is going.