Developing an Information System for Monitoring Student's Activity in Online Collaborative Learning

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper we address the issue of monitoring students' and groups' activity in online collaborative learning environments. This issue is especially important in the collaborative e-learning context, since an efficient monitoring process can provide valuable information to online instructors who may guide and support the development of collaborative learning projects. We have developed and tested an information system model which facilitates the automatic generation of weekly monitoring reports derived from data contained in server log files. These reports provide online instructors with visual information regarding students' and groups' activity, thus allowing for a quick and easy classification of students and groups according to their activity level. Therefore, entities with a low activity level are identified as soon as possible and just-intime assistance can be established for them. Furthermore, instructors can use these monitoring reports to forecast potential problems -such as students' dropouts or possible conflicts inside the groups due to unbalanced distribution of tasks-and take operational and tactical decisions oriented to avoid them.

Supporting Effective Monitoring and Knowledge Building in Online Collaborative Learning Systems

“…In order to validate the previous ideas, in this section, we introduce both a prototype of a web-based structured discussion forum system, called Discussion Forum (DF) (see [4] for a detailed description of this application) and a global scheme of the monitoring system called Student Activity Monitoring using Overview Spreadsheets (SAMOS) [5], which were developed to bring new opportunities to learning by discussion and to meet new pedagogical models. We report here on this novel experience and the results achieved in the real learning context of the Open University of Catalonia.…”

“…The general functioning of this system is explain next (see [5] for a complete description and Fig. 3):…”

“…3. A specific Java application, called EICA [5], is used to automatically read and process new incoming log files and to store the extracted data into a unique persistent database in the corresponding server. 4.…”

“…This knowledge is then fed back and presented to the participants in a suitable manner to greatly influence the collaborative process by allowing students to compare their individual performance to the group one [4]. This information also serves for the instructor to identify groups with a low activity level, which allows for establishing just-in-time assistance for them [5].…”

Towards an on-Line Student Assistant within a CSCL Framework

“…The analysis of collaborative interactions aims at monitoring student's activity and assessing the performance of learning: Beatriz Barros and M. Felisa Verdejo (Barros and Verdejo, 2000) analyzed student's interactions to improve collaborations; Juan (Juan 2008) developed an information system to monitor the student's activity in online collaborative learning; Putambekar (Putambekar, 2006) aimed at knowing whether as the collaborative interactions evolve new ideas raise or the built knowledge is enriched; in a study made by Yang and Chang (Yang & Chang, 2012) it has been found that interactive blogs are associated with positive attitudes towards academic achievement.…”