A Platform for Analyzing Students’ Behavior in Virtual Spaces on Mozilla Hubs

Social Virtual Reality (VR) or “Metaverse” platforms provide teachers with the opportunity to use educational virtual spaces for both distance learning and face-to-face teaching, to take advantage of its unique learning affordances. However, designing virtual spaces and incorporating them into teaching presents a challenge. Since teachers are typically not around when students use virtual spaces, it is difficult for them to ascertain how the spaces are being used during the classes. This article outlines a project to develop a data-logging and visualization tool for teachers making use of Mozilla Hubs. The tool tracks student behavior and presents the data in 3D as raw data points or heatmaps and only requires a standardized set-up with no need for client or server-side programming, thus allowing teachers with limited programming experience to use it. This framework will be further developed to include more visualization and analytical tools, such as trajectories and clustering, and will be made publicly available upon completion of the development.