Requirements of Chinese teachers for online student tracking and a comparison to their western counterparts

Abstract

Effective teaching requires teachers to know their students and to adapt their teaching accordingly, regardless of taking place in China or in Western countries. This raises requirements on online learning environments: they need to track online learners' actions and present these to the teachers. This paper investigates whether the requirements differ between Western and Chinese teachers. We address this question via the analysis of a questionnaire that investigates requirements collected from Chinese teacher who have been in online teaching field for several years. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the requirements and compare the results to the formal survey research on the requirements of student tracking system conducted by Western researchers. We found that several requirements differ significantly. The results of this work are significant as they inform the design of online learning environments in general and online learning data analysis in particular. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.