Generating Alerts for Drops in Student Activity Levels in a Social Learning Environment

Abstract

Monitoring students’ activity in a social learning environment is an important issue both for students and teachers. Providing learners with notifications whenever their activity level drops has the potential to increase their motivation and engagement. This paper tackles the issue of accurately pointing when a student has a drop or an increase in activity in the context of a social learning environment. We designed and implemented a data analysis framework which generates statistical dashboards based on aggregated student activity on three social media tools (blog, wiki and microblogging tool); alerts are subsequently issued in case of a significant decrease in activity. Experimental results obtained on student data collected over the course of five years reveal a pattern regarding the average number of generated alerts. Therefore our system can be successfully used by the instructor to easily configure the number of alerts issued to the students.