TrAVis (Tracking Data Analysis and Visualization Tools) Version 1.2 was briefly presented here. In the objective of making TrAVis better and especially match the real needs of the participants in the distance learning process, TrAVis has been introduced to a number of students, teachers and researchers from different disciplines. A survey has also been lunched to seek for the feedbacks from the users who had a 45 minutes hands-on session during the Summer School workshop in Grenoble last July.

With the survey data and some other significant comments from our colleagues, we are currently working on the development of TrAVis 1.3.

Besides the amelioration of the existing functional tools for tracking data visualization, a big number of bugs have been fixed and codings have been improved. In the next version of TrAVis, two new features will be added. Each feature contains a few more functional tools to allow users to automatically analyze and visualize the tracking data of the Computer Mediated Communication activities.

The first feature of TrAVis 1.3 will be called “Time Machine“. We aim at providing another possibility to the users, particularly the teachers, who wish to real-time monitor every action of a particular online student while he/she is using a Computer Mediated Communication tools (e.g. discussion forum). The “Time machine” will be equipped with flexible user interface that provides both the overview of every interaction of a user communication activity and in which the detail of each user action.

The second feature of TrAVis 1.3 will be called “Data Indicator Generator“. The current version of TrAVis does not allow user to look for the data indicators from the existing tracking data by their own. The reason is that the existing analysis methods are formulated to produce every data indicator without any user operation. Users can not chose which data indicator to or not to be viewed. We have thought about another interesting way to make the tracking data more substantive and if possible response more accurately to the expectation of each user. We are working on the conception of a functional tool that makes customization and personalization of the tracking data indicators possible with a few clicks from the users. With the “Data Indicator Generator” feature, TrAVis users will be able to control more efficiently the way tracking data indicator should be generated by the analysis components and to be next visualized by the visualization components.

Here some other new changes in TrAVis 1.3 :

• The cascading style sheet of TrAVis 1.3 is now compatible with the three world most used Web navigators: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari.
• The information tags are attached to each button of the principal menu of TrAVis.
• Graphics and background colors are modified.
• Ease of use graphic user interface (CSS, AJAX and Javascript)
• and a lot more to come…

We are expecting to give a demonstration of TrAVis 1.3 to our research team in January 2008.
I would like to thank my both advisors, Sébastien George and Patrick Prévôt for their times, their innovative ideas and for supporting my work.