Proceedings of Asia Computer Music Project 2012PROVIDING A FEELING OF OTHER LEARNERS’ PRESENCE IN AN
ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT VIA REALTIME SONIFICATION
OF THE ACCESS LOG
KITA Toshihiro
Kumamoto University

Naotoshi Osaka
Tokyo Denkio University

ABSTRACT• user’s IP address

When people learn using Web-based educational resources,
they are sitting in front of their own computer at home andare often physically isolated from other online learners. In
this study, an Open Sound Control based prototype system
for sonification of the access log of Moodle, a popular elearning system, has been developed as a way to provide
a feeling of other learners’ presence. To generate soundfrom access log in Moodle, we designed a mapping of theinformation of log files to sound parameters.
1. INTRODUCTION
When people learn using Web-based educational resources
such as an LMS (Learning Management System) or othere-learning related systems, they are sitting in front of theirown computer at home and are often physically isolated
from other online learners. In some courses they are typically getting in touch online with each others for doingsome particular group work assignments, but most of thetime they must do their own learning tasks alone. In othercourses simply the individual assignments and quizzes areprovided, so the learners are alone all the time from thebeginning until the end of the course.
In order to keep the learners’ motivation, it helps tofeel other learners doing the same learning activities andbelonging to the same course. Communicating formallyor informally with other learners via Social Networking
Services or something is one way for learners to get sucha feeling, though in a way it might sometimes disturb theirlearning. Sonification of the access log of the e-learning
system could be another indirect way to provide such afeeling.

• course ID number• module type
• action type• accessed URLetc, as shown in Table 1.
The method executed in Moodle for inserting those data
into the log table is defined as add_to_log() in a Moodle system file oflib/datalib.php, so it is appropriate to add some triggering command for realtime sonification just before theline of$DB->insert_record_raw(’log’, $log, false);
in add_to_log().

3. SONIFICATION MAPPING OF LOG DATA
To generate sound from the access log in Moodle, we designed a mapping of the access log information to soundparameters of a note. The single note, an element of thesound, we are currently using is a sine wave oscillation.
We used a mapping as follows:• time stamp : note-on timing1• user ID number : frequency• user’s IP addresses : pan• module type, action type : frequency deviation2
To determine the frequency deviation, we calculated
the degree of similarity of the module type and the action type compared to ’course view’ (the most typical one
as in the first line of Table 1) using levenshtein()[2],a PHP function to calculate Levenshtein distance between
two strings. This function returns 0 if the two strings exactly match. The sound to be generated is designed sothat the listeners (the online learners) can feel other online learners are also doing learning activities at the sametime as they are, and also the sound is intended to be nondisturbing and soft to the users who are doing learning

2. ACCESS LOG OF MOODLE
Moodle[1] is one of the most popular Web-based opensource systems used as online learning environments. Almost all the activities that a user made are recorded ina Moodle database table named mdl_log. The table includes the information about the every step of each user’s
activity such as :1 Only for sonification of the existing log data. For realtime sonfication, the sound notes are instantaneously triggered by users’ Moodleoperation.
2 static small deviation from the frequecny determined by user ID
number• time stamp• user ID number– 1–

Proceedings of Asia Computer Music Project 2012
id87079
87080
87081
87082
87083
87084
87085
87086
.....

time1350808027
1350808031
1350808071
1350808075
1350808076
1350808076
1350808406
1350808411

userid
6626
6626
6626
6626
6626
6626
7446
7446

ip
133.95.xx.yy
133.95.xx.yy
133.95.xx.yy
133.95.xx.yy
133.95.xx.yy
133.95.xx.yy
117.55.xx.yy
117.55.xx.yy

course
1
5267
5267
5267
5267
5267
8944
8944

modulecoursecoursepage
courseresource
resource
quiz
quiz

cmid
0
0
921
0
917
917
1159
1159

action
view
view
view
view
view
view
view summary
close attempt

url
view.php?id=1
view.php?id=5267view.php?id=921
view.php?id=5267
view.php?id=917
view.php?id=917
summary.php?attempt=936
review.php?attempt=936

info
15267
104
5267
149
149
168
168

Table 1. Example of Moodle log in the database table[5] The Open Sound Control

activities. The overlapping tones with different frequencies3 imply that a number of leaners are actively using thelearning management system. If a learner is simply viewing the content pages, the generated tone is a simple solid
sinusoidal wave tone, but the learner is doing more interactive activities such as posting to an online discussion
forum, or making an attempt at an online quiz, the generated sound is a mixture of sinusoidal wave tones withslightly different frequencies.

http://opensoundcontrol.org/[6] Open Sound Control for PHP
http://opensoundcontrol.org/implementation/open-sound-control-php[7] OSClisten
http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/OSClisten.html[8] http://tkita.net/paper/acmp2012/
7. AUTHOR’S PROFILE

4. SENDING SOUND PARAMETERS VIA OSC

KITA Toshihiro

Csound[3, 4] is used for sound generation, and the valuesof sound parameters are sent via Open Sound Control[5]in real time from Moodle server to Csound. The senderis written in PHP using the class defined in OSC.php[6].
The receiver is written in Csound code using Opcodes likeOSClisten[7].

Born in Nara in 1967. Withdrew from his doctoral program with certification accredited by his academic advisor, of Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University.
Currently a professor at the Institute for e-Learning Development of Kumamoto University. Ph.D. in Engineering(Nagoya University, 2005). Fields of interest: e-learning
systems, nonlinear systems, electronic music.

5. CONCLUSIONAn OSC-based prototype system for sonification of theaccess log of the e-learning system has been developed
as a way to provide a feeling of other learners’ presence.
To generate sound from the access log in Moodle, we designed a mapping of the information in the log table tosound parameters. We will further investigate what kindof sonification is nice for learners to listen to by trying avariety of mapping of data to sound. For that we are planning to let online learners evaluate the generated soundfrom our system. The developed system is planned to bereleased on the Web[8].

Naotoshi Osaka
Naotoshi Osaka is a composer and an acoustics researcher.
He received M.S. degree in electrical engineering fromWaseda University in 1978. He worked at the ElectricCommunication Laboratories, NTT, Tokyo, Japan, from1978 to 2003. He is presently a professor at Tokyo Denki
University. He received a Doctor of Engineering in 1994.
He is currently a president of Japanese Society for Sonic
Arts.

6. REFERENCES[1] Moodle.org
https://moodle.org/[2] levenshtein() : PHP Manual
http://jp.php.net/manual/en/function.levenshtein.php[3] Csound on Sourceforge
http://csound.sourceforge.net/[4] Csounds.com http://www.csounds.com/
3 ranges from 20Hz to 1200Hz– 2–