Transactional log analysis approach to evaluating an education Website

Abstract

This study made use of transaction log analysis as a means of identifying use patterns of an education website. This study was motivated by the recent proliferation of educational resources on the Intranet version of the Ministry of Education's IT in Education website. It is hoped that the findings would give an indication on users' preferences with regard to the website so that measures could be taken to better cater to the needs of the users. A set of transaction logs was analysed to reveal which were the most popular webpages accessed and whether there was a difference in the way schools in the different phases of the Masterplan for IT in Education use the website. The findings showed that transaction log analysis could be an effective means of identifying use patterns of resources on the World Wide Web. If the method is supplemented with questionnaires or interviews, then the findings would be more reliable. Even with limited resources, organisations could use this method to learn how their resources on the World Wide Web are serving their clientele or a particular group of clients.