STUDENTS ENGAGEMENT IN E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS—A COMPREHENSIVE MODEL: MEASUREMENT, EVALUATION, AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Abstract

Online learning has become at the core of education systems, especially after the Corona pandemic. Noteworthy, LMS (Learning Management System) records all students' actions, which is difficult in traditional education systems, which, if properly analyzed, can give a clear picture of the student's learning behavior. This study focuses on measuring and analyzing students' engagement with courses, thus providing students, teachers, and academic advisors with recommendations for improvement. Research has shown that the more students' engagement the higher the success rate. Therefore, we consider high engagement as a key success indicator in an education system. This research identified the system-interaction attributes influencing the student's engagement with a course. It integrates those attributes into a model for measuring and evaluating the degree of student's engagement-the LAST-CASE Model. The LAST-CASE model is designed to measure the different engagement dimensions, such as cognitive, social, academic, and affective dimensions as recommended by the Community of Inquiry (CoI). This article describes how to measure such attributes using both the LMS log and the xAPI method. In addition, we shed lights on how to assess the degree of "engagement" on different themes, e.g., for a student in a course, for a student across all courses in a particular field, for different students in different classes for the same course but taught by different teachers, etc.