Case Study O: Assessing Students’ Engagement with Online Quizzes over the Course of their Programme

The Professional Master of Education Post-Primary (PMEPP) is a two-year blended education programme that prepares students to become post-primary school teachers. The online asynchronous components of the programme are delivered using the Moodle Learning Management System (LMS). Students complete a range of activities and tasks online each week, including viewing presentations, contributing to discussion forums, completing quizzes, writing reflective content and participating in live webinars. Research conducted previously in-house using learning analytics has found a decrease in students' engagement with online activities throughout the programme lifecycle. As a starting point for an exploration of why this might be happening, I focused on quizzes as one of the tools that were being engaged with less as time went on. I was interested in finding out how students engage with the quizzes and identifying some factors that might influence this engagement. I decided to analyse user data from two modules at the start of year 1 and year 2 in the programme, to compare levels and patterns of engagement over time with particular regard to completion and retakes. I tested three hypotheses using appropriate data correlation methods: • I correlated completion levels for quizzes with completion levels for other online tasks, to see whether an increase in task workload resulted in a decrease in quiz engagement. • I correlated levels of quiz re-attempts with completion levels for other online tasks, to see whether different patterns of quiz attempts (i.e. single attempts or multiple attempts) were linked to different levels of online engagement. • I used a third statistical test to ascertain the relationship, if any, between student gender and different patterns of quiz attempts, to see if gender might be a factor in quiz engagement.