Qualitative Evaluation of Student Participation in Distributed Learning Communities

Authors

Abstract

Student participation in forums and other collaborative learning
environments are effective ways for students to acquire new
knowledge. But teachers have difficulty to evaluate, in an
objective way, the student participation in this kind of
environments. With this motivation, we have developed an
approach for the evaluation of student participation in
collaborative learning environments. This paper presents a set of
measures that quantify the quality of student participation in a
discussion forum. The developed evaluation model is based on the
analysis of statistical data that measures the average quality of
student messages. This model is integrated in a Learning
Management System providing useful information about student
participation for the teacher. We also present an application
example and an overview about related work.

Subject

ELearning

Conference

3rd E-learning Conference â?? Computer Science Education, September 2006