Digital learning environments, such as MOOCs have grown tremendously in popularity in recent years, but they remain a somewhat hands off environment that makes it difficult for the tutor to know whether students are absorbing the material, much less intervene.

New work from the Higher School of Economics and KU Leuven aims to rectify matters by providing a way to measure growth in students’ proficiency whilst using digital learning environments.

Growth is an obvious measure of success for any course, and can be characterized by the difference in knowledge at the start of the course and at the end.  This approach of using two control points often fails to take account of the dynamics of growth within the course however.

The new approach taps into the digital logged data of each student, which represents various events recorded by the online learning platform during the course of the study, whether that’s watching video lectures of solving tasks.  The researchers believe that by tapping into this data, it’s possible to see various forms of proficiency growth, including continuous growth throughout the course and local growth in specific areas.

Forms of improvement

The researchers calculate continuous growth cumulatively as students engage with materials throughout the course.  Local growth is calculated at various points throughout the course as students engage in tests or specific tasks. Both of these metrics are unique and specific to each student, therefore providing a figure that will only apply to individuals.

“Thus, we see the results for each student at any time of the course, and we don’t waste their time on voluminous entrance and final tests. Our research is a conceptual transition from traditional analysis of test results to progressive analysis of digital traces in the educational environment,” the authors say.

The team believe that their models could help both teachers and online learning platforms alike, and may even prove beneficial to students too.  With online learning booming, it’s an insight that is much needed.