A STUDENT PROGRESS MONITORING TOOL IN e-TUTORIAL

Abstract

Monitoring periodic students’ progress is a need throughout their learning process even in traditional education. In student-centered e-learning (SCeL), the monitoring of the student learning progress is needed and considered very difficult. One of the reasons is, there is lack of face to face contact between the student and the tutor in e-learning. In the recent years, various e-learning applications have emerged and played quite important role as a medium between those parties. It comes in many forms including e-tutorial. This, however, reduced the possibility of using informal evaluations such as body language observation, participation and classroom attendance to assess student knowledge and understanding. The situation leads the many existing e-learning tools merely depend on unreliable data like date and time of each student’s first and last login, number of viewed/posted contents and number of hits per page. Hence, in providing useful SCeL for e-learning, the monitoring process needs to be enhanced. The aim of the monitoring is not only to assess students’ progress but it is also to maintain or increase students’ motivations to learn. An approach of identifying and recording the strength of individual student in different concepts through quiz result can be used. Based on the feedback given for the earlier quiz, subsequent quizzes will be provided to a good performer or the quiz at the same level will be given to the student. The latter is to let the students to practise until a sufficient knowledge is attained for each concept. The student profile in the system that monitors the learning process helps the student to track their learning. Student Monitoring and Profiling tool (StuMOP) was built to support this idea. The evaluation of StuMOP tool demonstrated that the SCeL increased the motivation of the student in their learning process thereby improving the quality of learning.