e-Learner Tracking

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eLT Project

e-Learning is becoming increasingly important to the learning experience of students. Although many teaching programmes now include e-Learning components, relatively little is known about how students use e-Learning material and - more importantly - how learning is facilitated by the e-Learning strategy employed.

The overall aim of this project is to undertake a detailed analysis of students' usage of online courseware and to relate the findings to the guiding principles used in the course design. A small-scale trial has already been completed using the undergraduate Physics course Computer Simulation that incorporates e-Learning material as part of a blended-learning approach. The results of this initial work were very encouraging and we are extending the work to the much larger, more mainstream Physics course Foundations of Physics that has a well-established WebCT presence of over 5 years.

This work will result in a set of tools to track, analyse and display students' usage of online material for the Foundations of Physics course. These tools could in principle be applied to other courses packaged within WebCT. Furthermore, the lessons learned and experience gained in the analysis and interpretation of this type of data for large student cohorts using a complex e-Learning package would be applicable to a wide range of e-Learning courses across the University.

For more information on the outcomes of the pilot project see the Documents section.

You can investigate the prototype tracking tools from the Activities link.

Folks learning at a computer

For further information please contact the project team at elt@epcc.ed.ac.uk