Student Participation and Progress tracking for Web-Based Courses

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.

Several types of information are provided by WebCT that allow the instructor to monitor student participation and progress. The first is a student-tracking summary page. This page consists of a table with one row presented for each student. For each student an indication of the date of first access to the course, most recent access to the course, and the total number of accesses to the course is presented. The students in the table can be sorted in any order. For example, sorting on number of accesses provides quick feedback on the students who have had little interaction with the course, and on the other end, those that have had the most interaction with the course. Clicking on any of the students provides more detailed information for that student including a histogram of accesses made to various course components, an indication of bulletin-board usage, a complete history of course accesses, and more. 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 more.

WebCT courses are just now coming into use. The various tracking facilities of WebCT have proven to provide useful information for the instructor regarding student participation and progress.