Enhancing competencies of less-able students to achieve learning outcomes: Learner aware tool support through Business intelligence

摘要

Early identification of less-able students is very important to develop them towards their full potential. However due to the increasing student intakes in each year for a degree program, it is a difficult task to identify those students who require the guidance and monitoring from the beginning. Manual observation and data collections, which require additional workload, are time consuming and a challenge to practice. Therefore efficient and usable tool support is essential to assist academics to identify the less-able students during the early stages of a course module. In this paper we introduce such a tool with the use of business intelligence helping the academics to decide student capability levels based on graph analysis on Moodle user log data. Moodle dataset of MSc in Business Management students of University of Moratuwa was used for this research. The XML formatted data were extracted from Moodle logs and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) were used to enhance the extraction, transformation and loading process. Data cubes were analyzed with multidimensional queries. Graph visualization was used and a number of patterns were realized to identify the less-able students using following data of student activities: assignment submission, usage scenarios, and number of occasions the course pages and other resources were accessed.