Title : Empirical evidence of online student support (engagement) and its outcomes of modules in the moodle lms in an ODEL institution
Abstract:
Nowadays, students and teachers are required to spend more time and effort using Learning Management Systems (LMS). Within these online learning environments, lecturers can find certain level of information about their students’ study habits through features offered by most LMSs. Students are expected to hold online discussions, participate through interaction with online learning materials by clicking and reading, as well as posting their opinions, solving problems and executing assigned tasks on these LMS’s.
This study aimed to explain, label and classify engagement based on icons read or clicked that are reflecting a definition of behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement.
Students, as LMS users, by default leave automatic traces of their activity known as “navigation records”. This vast amount of data accumulates daily and provide information about the patterns of how students study and learn to execute assigned tasks.
A Mixed Method approach (Cross-sectional and Ethnography) study was used to determine online student engagement as defined by (Kuh, 2003, Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004) and its outcomes evident by navigation records left as a database on module Moodle LMS landing page. An analysis of 80,000 log views database was created by only 266 students carried out in a year (January 2023 to December 2023) . Data was first subjected to quantitative analysis, and thereafter a review of the log data evidence of navigation records were compared with literature available (in a traditional Ethnography research approach). Data collected was on Icons on LMS. Three groups were created based on frequency of log views (high, medium, and low participation groups).
Majority of the students were engaged on content and behavioural engagements. Content engagement icons were mostly viewed than any other types of online student support. The high participation students (more than 100 to 1000’s log views) had high academic performance, so as the medium participation students (between 100 and 50 log views) and low participation students (less than 50 log views) respectively. Information literacy was also highest at high participation group, than medium and low participation group.
