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Tracking Student Engagement in an Online Course

Sat, February 8, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBA

Abstract

Student motivation presents a major challenge for online course success. We know anecdotally that student motivation varies with different kinds of course content, but it has been hard to connect content characteristics, student engagement and motivation, and learning outcomes in the online setting.

This paper presents preliminary findings from a project examining how students engage with an online course using an online textbook with embedded video lectures. Most of the lectures were filmed in the field in the Greater Yellowstone Area, but a few were filmed in studio with a lightboard, or as voiceovers with historic photographs, B-roll, maps, and other graphics.

We can track how long students keep a given page open, whether they watch a video at all, and whether they view 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of each video. This allows us to relate variations in content type to the time of student engagement. For example, we can ask whether the time students keep a text file open is linear in the number of words, or whether students engage less (more) with long texts. We can ask similar questions about student video viewing, looking both at the length of the video and characteristics of the content (studio or field, voiceover, use of graphics and still photos, and so on). The lectures are divided between a female instructor and a male instructor, mostly randomly, allowing us to examine some gender-based issues.

We also have data on student performance on specific assignments, the overall course, online quiz completion rates, and course completion rates. As a baseline, this lets us connect instructional mode (text or video) to student performance on specific assignments. Going further, we can connect the student engagement data to their performance on specific assignments. We hope to be able to connect student choices over how to engage with different types of content with their overall learning.

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