Identifying Measures of Student Behavior from Interaction with a Course Management System

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to identify process measures of student interaction with a course management system (CMS). Logs maintained by Web servers capture aggregate user interactions with a Website. When combined with a login system and context from the course recorded in the CMS, more detailed measures of individual student interaction can be extracted electronically. Measures of student interaction with one CMS, ITWeb, were identified at the scopes of the entire course and individual homework assignments. Measures at the level of the entire course were collected through ITWeb for two different semesters of the same undergraduate course, while measures for individual assignments were collected for one of the courses. Correlation analysis was performed between the proposed measures and student grades with inconsistent results between courses and assignments. Though not consistently related to performance, this work demonstrates collecting objective measures of student interaction with a CMS.