Learning Analytics for Tracking Student Progress in LMS

Abstract The pandemic of the COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation oflearning and training. Many industries, especially higher education institutions,have been using e-Learning platforms. Learning Management System (LMS) inparticular, has gained popularity as a tool capable of managing learning andtraining processes as well as supporting learning process and administration. Itpresents an important package of services and features capable of facilitating andenhancing the e-Learning experience. Nevertheless, LMS offers only a few, if notno, functionalities when it gets to tracking the instructional progress of students.Progress in a learning experience is indicative of how students interact withcourses and learning materials. Based on such interaction, the teacher can detectlower performers, project students’ progress, and anticipate the ones at risk aswell as those who need intervention. The use of the LMS generates an importantamount of data. This data can become extremely useful when analysed andtransformed into indicators reflecting the learner’s progress. To this end, ourresearch project used learning analytics to determine and define indicatorscapable of monitoring students’ progress. With such analytics, we were able todetermine struggling students, lower performers and ultimately those who needreinforcement and tutoring. The main goal was to greatly improve students’success rates and the overall effectiveness of the learning process. We present acase study in which students’ progress was tracked and monitored using a set ofstudent’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The data used in this study wascollected from the Web technologies course from the e-campus platform at the Cadi Ayyad University. The defined indicators allowed for tracking students’progress during the course, but they were not able to determine the performance of students.