To know what they are doing in a web-based laboratory, a system for saving information on the learners' activities into Sakai's logs

Tools utilizing the web-server's logs for monitoring and analyzing the users' behavior are used in many fields where the Internet plays a major role as in e-commerce and e-learning. These tools are very useful for tracking the learning activities of the students in web-based Course Management Systems (CMS). While the logs can be customized to include much information on what goes-on in the CMS, they include very little or nothing about any external web application/laboratory that might be linked with it. Such information would give the instructors an idea of how students manage their knowledge and skills to complete the tasks assigned to them. This contribution comes to show how within the web-based laboratory (NVLab) that we designed for supporting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) courses delivered in Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) we handled this issue by developing a system for saving information on learners' activities in the log of the web server. This system successfully uses Sakai web-services technology to save information starting from the time the learner accessed our premises until what he/she typed.