Analysis of a Learning Management System by Using Google Analytics: A Case Study From Turkey

Introduction

Rapid developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) bring changes together. These changes nowadays affect almost every field of life. Today’s society is therefore called as knowledge society where ICTs has an important place in daily life. Economic, social and cultural life is changing based on digital technologies and its effects of them can be obviously observed. One of the most important characteristics of knowledge society is seen as continuous learning or lifelong learning. Unlike physical workers in industry society, brain power and intellectual capabilities of workers are more important features in knowledge society (Yılmaz, 2012b). Since knowledge is produced, evaluated, transferred or processed by knowledge workers, these workers should be capable of handling all kind of processes related to knowledge. Education has a significant role for these workers in order to “make the upcoming generation active participants in the society; teaching, learning as well as evaluation in the information digital society can be supported using relevant theories and models”(Hošková-Mayerová & Rosická, 2015).

Like any other field, characteristics of learning have changed with recent technological advances. Traditional learning techniques fail to catch today’s expectations and rapidly changing technological developments. Due to this reason, e-learning concept shows up as a concept that combines ICTs with learning concept. As the amount of the data produced by using e-learning platforms and with the emergence of ICT in almost every industry, analyzing e-learning data has gained in importance. So that tools like Google Analytics enables researchers to make efficient analyses which may have useful and meaningful results for learners’ perspective as well as organizations.

In this chapter, the authors aim to explain how Learning Management System (LMS) providers can improve their e-learning services using Google Analytics based on a case study. In this scope, Google Analytics data of Enocta Academic Education Platform (EAEP), which offers course content and LMS services for organizations and universities in Turkey, is used to observe changes in user habits between 2011-2017. Thus, it is aimed to give advices to LMS providers in terms of improving their software considering changes in user habits. Therefore, in the following section, authors give definitions of e-learning concept, LMS and web analytics and after that literature summary about Google Analytics and Google Analytics analysis in e-learning.