Vis2Learning: A Scenario-based Guide to Support Developers in the Creation of Visualizations on Educational Data

Information Visualization provides techniques to build graphics representation that enhance human perception from data. In educational data area, visualizations support professionals to analyze a great amount of data to then make decisions to improve the learning-teaching process. However, the visualizations of educational data often do not fulfill the needs of the end-users. In this paper, we present a scenario-based guidelines for the development of visualizations in e-learning context. For each scenario, we provide the chart format, describe its aim and characteristics and gives examples of its application in the e-learning context. Besides, we provide recommendations to bring improvements to the data visualized from the users interaction with that chart. We conducted an evaluation with 26 participants divided into two groups where one of them used our guidelines and the other did not. Our results revealed that the participants who used the guidelines were more successful in building the visualizations. They reported that the guidelines allow them to be concentrated on the main purpose of the visualizations. We saw that the participants background on e-learning or on the use of charts did not have influence in the building of suitable solutions which reinforce the usefulness of our guidelines.