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Evaluating Online Engagement and Narrative Feedback as Indicators of Student Performance

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Learning in the Age of Digital and Green Transition (ICL 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 634))

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Abstract

Learning Management Systems for online learning in higher education allow for the collection of data that can describe student engagement and online behaviour. Student engagement refers to the degree of participation and active involvement with content by students and is often linked to academic achievement. Narrative feedback given by students can be used by academic staff to review and improve learning and teaching. Feedback can also be used as an indicator of student engagement and shown to correlate to student performance. Machine learning algorithms that predict whether a student will pass or fail, are trained by using student engagement features. Text mining techniques that help extract variables from narrative feedback are shown to improve these models for identifying at-risk students. The feature distribution of engagement factors indicate that there are patterns amongst the variables between the students who fail and those that pass.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://moodle.com.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, South Africa

    Philip Winfield & Charmain Cilliers

  2. Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa

    Barend van Wyk

Authors
  1. Philip Winfield
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  2. Charmain Cilliers
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  3. Barend van Wyk
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philip Winfield .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. CTI Global, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Michael E. Auer

  2. Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, Vienna, Austria

    Wolfgang Pachatz

  3. Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Tiia Rüütmann

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Winfield, P., Cilliers, C., van Wyk, B. (2023). Evaluating Online Engagement and Narrative Feedback as Indicators of Student Performance. In: Auer, M.E., Pachatz, W., Rüütmann, T. (eds) Learning in the Age of Digital and Green Transition. ICL 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 634. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26190-9_10

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