Overview
Filling forms and surveys can be a tedious task for the students, no
matter if they fill them online or in paper form, during classes or at
home. We have tried to find more information about the students
behavior by using some of the web-server log files. We only used global
information, not individual ones.
How can you learn about the students behavior without asking
questions?
Since all lectures of one discipline are available online, the first
thing you can get are the download daily based download rate. Below
you can find such graphic for one discipline, each day in October 2008.
We had a test on the end of 13rd and it is easy to see the student
study pattern increasing after 10th.
This is interesting to see the student behavior, but what are they
really looking for? We got exactly the same data and plotted by
lecture. See the results below:
For every lecture in the semester, considering the same discipline, we
got the number of unique views, no matter the date the lecture was
viewed (the x axis represented the day the lecture was taught). What if
you, as a instructor, have only enough time to review/improve 6
lectures? Which ones are you going to select?
All the data we got are based on the server log. In our software, we
also update the server statistic every 30s about the students behavior.
So we can get the following graphic:
Notice that, since we have the seek ability, some students moved
directly to the middle of the video. Notice, also that almost half of
the students viewed less than 25 minutes of classes. Together, these
data can show you a lot of what do you need to improve or what are your
students looking for in your web lectures.
How dificult should that be to the instructor? How dificult should
that be to the students? We implemented a transparent way of viewing
all these informations based only on the webserver log, without
requiring any action from the instructor nor the student.