Students' Online Learning Strategies: How E-Learning Data Can Help Identify them and Improve Learning Effectiveness

Abstract

Educational data is a kind of event log that is generated when students engage in different types of online educational activities. The current study aimed to identify the learning strategy of online learning. As e-learning data, the digital footprints of students of two online courses of RUDN-university hosted on the educational platform Stepik were used (a total of 2206 people). The analysis included the following data: the number of course elements (text/video, test task), the number of those who registered for the course and completed the training, the number of those who did not complete a single element, the student drop-out points, the number of course elements viewed, the number of test elements completed, the number of those who successfully completed the final test. The statistical analysis made it possible to identify the four strategies for mastering the material: (1) students who enrolled in the course but dropped out after viewing the first element or never started learning (av.60 %); (2) the students who completed all the tasks and successfully completed the training (about 30%); (3) the students who viewed the first element and completed the final test (5-8%); and (4) the students who actively viewed several elements and then proceeded to the final test (2-3%).The results should draw attention to the importance of including elements or programmes in online learning that promote the development of self-regulation skills, which can help improve learning effectiveness.