Consistency of Students' Pace in Online Learning

The purpose of this study is to investigate the consistency of students' behavior regarding their pace of actions over sessions within an online course. Pace in a session is defined as the number of logged actions divided by session length (in minutes). Log files of 6,112 students were collected, and datasets were constructed for examining pace rank consistency in three main situations: day/night sessions, beginning/end (for both situations, sessions of the same learning mode were taken), and a comparison between sessions from different learning modes. For each dataset, students were ranked twice, according to their pace in the two sub-groups, and these ranks were correlated. Results obtained with this study's data suggest that pace is sometimes not consistent, hence might not be considered as a characterizing measure for the whole learning period. A discussion of this study and further research is provided. (Contains 1 figure and 5 tables.) [For the complete proceedings, "Proceedings of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM) (2nd, Cordoba, Spain, July 1-3, 2009)," see ED539041.]