Data Analysis as a Tool for Optimizing Learning Management Systems

The advent of the Internet has opened a scope for research in new methods and tools that may facilitate the teaching and learning processes. This has, in turn, led to the development of learning platforms to support teaching and learning activities. The market penetration of these has been such that nowadays most universities provide their academic community with some form of a learning management system (LMS). Although a lot of effort has been put into deploying these platforms, the usage statistics that they generally provide are not generally processed to optimize their use within a specific context or institution (or confronted with quality or innovation indexes to produce useful feedback information). In this paper we propose a methodology for data analysis and apply it to the particular case of the University of Valencia(Spain). Besides, we briefly describe a computer implementation that facilitates the application of this methodology to any other existing LMS which provides usage statistics.