One common side-effect of the recent proliferation of WWW-based courses has been a loss of the ability to gauge a student's interest in, and progress through a course until an assignment or exam is given. This may be too late to help some students catch up. In a traditional lecture-based course it is relatively easy to determine whether a student has been attending classes. Likewise their level of involvement in lectures is immediately apparent through the questions they ask and their attentiveness during lectures. Unfortunately, WWW-based courses do not offer the same level of feedback. In delivering WWW-based courses at UBC in the Department of Computer Science, our experience led us to realize the value of immediate and detailed knowledge of student progress through the course. Therefore, we designed and incorporated student progress monitoring tools into WebCT, our environment for building WWW-based courses. WebCT allows quick creation of WWW-based educational environments. The built-in student progress tracking tools facilitate timely determination of the progress of each student through the course material, as well as an overall determination of the level of use of each course component.
Keywords: WebCT, Authoring Environment, Progress Tracking
Over the last several years, there has been a proliferation of WWW-delivered courses. Much discussion has occurred regarding the relative merits of lecture-based versus WWW-based education. The usual argument against WWW-based learning is the loss of interaction or student participation. Student participation here refers to the level of interaction between a student and the course material, a student and other students, and a student and the instructor.
As a result, some WWW-based educational environments have attempted to create opportunities for interactions with the course material, the instructor, and other students. The problem, however, is that even though these opportunities for student participation have been created, their effect on the level of student participation is rarely quantified. Likewise, student progress through the material is usually measured only indirectly through assignments or exams. Fine-grained tracking of student progress and participation is rarely available.
In a lecture-based course, measuring student participation is easy. Does the student show up for class? Does the student appear to listen attentively? Does the student ask meaningful questions and participate in class discussions? The answers to these questions provide a strong indication of the level of a student's participation. Unfortunately, student participation and progress can be difficult to measure in WWW-based courses. Often little or no information is available and even a simple question such as "has student X even begun the course" can be difficult to answer until the student has fallen behind and missed a quiz or assignment. Effective student participation and progress tracking would help answer this and many related questions.
In the Department of Computer Science at UBC, we have been giving WWW-based courses over the last two years[1]. During the last year we have developed an authoring environment, WebCT (World Wide Web Course Tools) [2]. WebCT provides a large set of tools and an authoring interface that allows for the creation of sophisticated WWW-based courses. The course designer requires little or no technical expertise. Our initial experiences of giving WWW-based courses with no facility for student participation or progress tracking led us to develop a set of student-tracking tools for use with WebCT-developed courses. These tools automatically form a part of every course developed using WebCT and can be called upon at any time by the course instructor or facilitator.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, a brief overview of WebCT and its tools (other than for progress tracking) is given. Next, adetailed look at the student progress tracking facilities of WebCT is presented. Finally, conclusions and future work are outlined.
The section provides a brief overview of WebCT. Those already familiar with WebCT can skip this section and move on to the next section.
WebCT is a tool that facilitates the creation of sophisticated World Wide Web-based educational environments. It can be used to create entire on-line courses, or to simply publish materials that supplement existing courses. The content of a course is provided by the course designer. Interactivity, structure and educational tools are provided by WebCT.
A course developed using WebCT is organized around one main homepage. This homepage is the entry point for the course and can contain, among other things, a banner image, a textual message, a message of the day, links to course content elements (notes and assignments, for example), and links to course tools. A course tool is a feature supplied by WebCT that can be incorporated into any course. Tools can be made accessible from the main course homepage, link pages, or from content pages. Tools are divided into two groups, student tools (for the use of the student) and designer tools (for use by the course designer and facilitator).
Several types of information are provided by WebCT that allow the instructor to monitor student participation and progress. Each provides the instructor with some insight into the progress of the student through the course. It should be noted that all student progress information for a particular student is available not only to the instructor, but also to that student. This way every student can see first hand what information WebCT is accumulating about their access to the course.
The first student-tracking page is the student-tracking summary page. This page consists of a table with one row presented for each student. There are five columns presented on that page. These are:
At the top of the table are the column names. Clicking on any of the column names has the effect of bringing that columns to the left of the table and (more importantly) causing the table to be sorted on that column. Having the table be sorted on any column is a simple but wonderful feature in that it allows the instructor to instantly identify (for example) all students with zero accesses to the course material, or the one student with the largest number of accesses.
First access date and last access date show the dates of the initial and most recent accesses to the on-line course material. They provide a quick reference indicating whether the student has started the course, and whether the student is still making access to the course materials. These are useful for several reasons. First, in the initial week or two of the course, the instructor is able to determine those students that have not begun the course and make contact with them to ensure that they have access to the course and still wish to participate. Sorting the column by the first access date brings those students that have not yet begun the course to the top of the table. At the University of British Columbia this feature is also useful in case a student asks later to drop the course. Here, a student who is registered in a course, but later claims that the registration was in error can ask to be dropped from the course. In this case the instructor is asked to verify that the student never participated. The summary page can easily provide that information.
The Number of Hits indicates the total number of accesses to individual pages of course content. Access to the homepage is not counted in this number. This is interesting in that it provides and idea of how much use the student is making of the on-line material.
The following is an example of the summary page:
More detailed tracking information can be shown for any student by clicking on the linked left-most column for that student. When clicked, the student profile page is shown. The student profile page provides some summary information at the top, and one of three tracking selections at the bottom. The summary information includes all the information previously seen on the summary page, with the addition of the title of the most recently visited course content page. Below this summary are three buttons. These are:
Distribution of hits shows, for the selected student, an idea of what kind of accesses have been made by that student. The information shown on that page indicates, of the course references made, what percentage were to:
Another indication of participation is given on the same page by showing how many of the bulletin-board articles have been read by that student, how many original postings have been made by that student, and how many follow-up postings have been made. Below is an example of the distribution of hits page.
Number of pages accessed shows the student's coverage of the course. A bar graph shows the total number of pages of content in the course and, of those, how many have been visited by that student. As the course progresses, students who have covered a portion of the course which is smaller than what should have been covered to that point can be identified and helped. Below is an example of the number of pages accessed page.
Finally, history of pages visited shows a complete history of pages of course content that have been visited by that student, in the order that they were visited. This might be useful for further investigation into a student that is having particular trouble with one or two course sections. Here, the instructor, after checking which pages have been reviewed by a student, might better be able to make recommendations on remedial work. An example follows:
There is also a "page-tracking" facility that allows the instructor to determine the usage of various course components. As an example, there is information for each page of content that shows the number of accesses to that page, average duration of access to that page, and how many bulletin-board articles have been sent regarding that page. Again, this table can be sorted on any column by pressing the top of the desired column. This information can help the instructor determine which pages pose a problem, or are of special interest to students. An example is shown below:
WebCT courses are just now coming into use. While there may be more that we can do in terms of accurate student-participation tracking, these tools are proving to be of tremendous help in identifying slow-starting and non-participatory students. They are also providing very interesting insight into exactly how well our on-line resources are being utilized. In the past, we had to rely on information gathered through the administration of questionnaires or on the more general information produced by Web server usage tools. We plan to continue our work on WebCT and on student tracking in particular, and look forward to hearing suggestions from our beta testers on how these tools can be improved.
[1] Murray W. Goldberg, "CALOS: An Experiment With Computer-Aided Learning for Operating Systems", Proceedings of the 27th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Feb 15-18, 1996
[2] Murray W. Goldberg, Sasan Salari, "World Wide Web-Course Tool: An Environment for Building WWW-Based Courses", Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 28 (1996) 1219-1231
Murray Goldberg © 1996. The author assigns to the University of New Brunswick and other educational and non-profit institutions a non exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author grants a non-exclusive license to the University of New Brunswick to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
N.A.WEB 96 - The Second International North America World Wide Web Conference http://www.unb.ca/web/wwwdev/ University of New Brunswick.