Observations on student behaviors in a university distance learning using LMS

ABSTRACT

Due to the global new coronavirus pandemic in 2020, universities have shifted from face-to-face education to distance education. We conducted distance learning lessons of four months' duration for 1147 students, using learning management systems (LMSs). We chose the "Information Literacy" class, which is compulsory for first-year university students. In this chapter, we have analyzed student behaviors collected from three different LMSs, each having a specific role, and clarified the characteristics of student behaviors. We also examined the access timing, frequency, and success rate, and found that the students' final grades were influenced by those parameters as well as class announcements, gender differences, and instructors' attitudes. Additionally, we scrutinized the time when the students accessed the assignments, how many assignments they submitted, and how their behavior affected the final results. Consequently, we succeeded in obtaining meaningful results. We observed that the access frequency decreased over time, regardless of the type of assignment. It may be difficult for students to maintain their motivation in distance education. We noticed that both categories of students-those who submitted the assignments early and late-tended to obtain lower scores than those submitting them in between, i.e., during the middle period, who tended to obtain higher scores than the others. We also found that female students tended to give up on solving assignments at an early stage. Our analysis and results will help instructors to understand the general characteristics of students, and enable them to form models for certain groups of students, so that they can support each group differently from the early stages of distance education. © 2021 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.