Eye-tracking data on resource search in Moodle: course format and organisation of materials (35 university students)

This dataset contains the anonymised data from two within-subject eye-tracking studies. The studies examined how the design of a Moodle course affects students' visual search effort. They were conducted in 2025 at the Faculty of Philology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), with 35 undergraduate students, most of them from the degree in English Studies. The data support the paper "Diseñar Moodle a partir de la evidencia: seguimiento ocular de la búsqueda de recursos", presented at the III Congreso en Innovación Docente de las Universidades Madrileñas (MadrID 2027, UAM). Study 1 compared three Moodle course formats (tabs, grid and topics). Participants had to locate the exercises of the second unit. Study 2 compared three ways of organising a unit's materials (folders, bold headings and a full list). Participants had to locate the additional readings or exercises. Both studies were run in a single session. The stimuli were static screenshots of Moodle 4.5 courses (1920 × 1080 px), taught in English. They were presented in random order with no time limit, and participants pressed the space bar once they had found the target. Gaze was recorded with an Irisbond Hiru eye tracker at an effective sampling rate of 30 Hz. Fixation measures were computed with Irisbond's Jakin software. For each participant and screen, the dataset reports: number of fixations mean fixation duration (ms) total fixation duration (ms) search time (s) presentation order A final questionnaire recorded which course format each participant found most attractive and which most intuitive. The Excel workbook contains the following sheets: LEEME: README Diccionario: variable dictionary Participantes: grouped demographic data and stated preferences Datos: one row per participant and screen, in long format (210 rows) Estimulos: description of the six screens Estimulos_imagenes: the six screens as participants saw them Descriptivos: mean, SD and median per condition, calculated with formulas ANOVA: repeated-measures ANOVA on ln(x + 1), Greenhouse-Geisser corrected Tabla1_Estudio1 and Tabla2_Estudio2: the results tables of the paper The sheets, variable names and documentation are in Spanish. To protect anonymity, participants are identified by codes (P01–P35), age is given in ranges, and degree and language level are grouped. No health or other sensitive data are included. Four people were excluded from the original 39: two because of data loss and two who were teaching staff. The research was carried out within the UCM Innova-Docencia projects no. 415 (2023–2024) and no. 323 (2024–2025). The Hiru eye tracker and Jakin software were provided by Irisbond S.L. under its collaboration agreement with UCM.