AN APPROACH TO MEASURE STUDENT ACTIVITY IN LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Nowadays most universities and educational centres use LCMSs to support the learning and teaching process. In the new framework of the European Higher Education Space, in which the student learns to learn and where the assessment must consider the whole activity carried out by the learner, it is necessary to have some indicator which measures the attendance and participation of each student in virtual courses. This work proposes several student activity indicators which are flexible, extendible and independent from the LMCS. They are based on a parameter which gathers the instructor's criteria in order to measure the activity of his course (time spent, hits or a combination of both). These indicators are obtained for each learner in each resource (content pages, forums, etc.) with relation to the activity carried out by his or her classmates. These indicators will be shown periodically both to the learners and to the instructors so that each student can observe the effort/dedication levels he or she has made compared with the rest of the group and the instructor can assess the grade of activity and participation of each student in the course and furthermore, detect students at risk of drop-out, gaining insights about the learning style of each student and also check if the effort level carried out by students is adequate or higher than the instructor estimated for the course.