## 5 Experimental Analysis And Results  
We experimented and evaluated the implementation of the proposed monitor metaphors in a Moodle theme, named MonitorView, which will be published later with an open license. The theme format allowed us to create a customised visualisation of the elements without modifying the functionality of the LMS, in a modular way easy to install.  
MonitorView is an extension of the Standard theme with the addition of the following functionalities to the course visualisation page:  
* Activation/deactivation of the _monitoring features_;
* Selection panel for the _monitor parameters_;
* _Thermometer bar_ visualisation mode;
* _Dimensional morphing_ visualisation mode;
* _Tag cloud_ morphing visualisation mode.  
When turning on the monitor features, an additional section is displayed in the standard interface, above the current course learning objects (see Figure 3). The MonitorView settings form enables the user to select and adjust the monitor parameters (e.g., time frame). The main settings are the Metaphor and Mode selections. In a dynamic visualisation, the metaphor is morphed in real-time (i.e., having the start date of the object creation and the end date of the timestamp). The dynamic visualisation is updated at the page load only, to avoid flickering or other usability issues of a continuous refresh. The static metaphor allows the educator to select a start and end date and visualise the morphed result. Using the two dropdown boxes, the user can choose to represent the information using the _Thermometer bar_ (\"Thermometer bar\") or _Dimensional morphing_ (\"Morphing\") metaphors.  
Picking up the date and time, the user can select the time window to analyse, fixing the reference date for the temporal proximity data analysis.  
The last parameter is the selection of users' aggregation. By default, the parameter is set to show all the users, i.e., all Moodle user roles. The selection can be fine-tuned choosing a specific user role or a single user or group of users.  
The result of this parameters set is the in-place morphing of the course page. The colours to represent the temporal proximity to the reference date of the learning objects, as introduced in Section 3.3, are graded on a discrete scale shown in Figure 4. The least accessed objects are rendered in dark blue and hot topics are in pure red. The dark grey colour is used to highlight the learning objects with no accesses.  
The experiments have been held in the University of Perugia, embedding the MonitorView theme in the academic e-learning platform, called UniStudium, developed as a component of a more complex AI-based system, aiming at modeling user behavior in e-learning systems for detecting and analysing user reaction to interfaces and semantic aspects [27; 28; 29]. The experiments involved 12 courses of different bachelor degrees, in blended learning, with their 12 leading instructors. The courses included from 90 to 120 students each (mostly in age range 18-25). All the instructors involved in the experimental phase had already used the Moodle platform for at least one year, to avoid a bias introduced by the teachers' learning curve. After the collection of the learning objects' access information in an anonymised form, the access logs of instructors and students have been analysed to investigate the potential of the three metaphors. Collected data spans a time frame of three different exam terms. Example visualisations are shown in Figures 6-9 from the \"Intelligent and Mobile Technology\" course of the Computer Science bachelor's degree program.