GENERIC USAGE MONITORING OF PROGRAMMING STUDENTS

Abstract

It is becoming feasible and practical to monitor the generic computer usage of students for extended periods, recording low level actions such as mouse clicks, typing and window changes. This paper presents a case study on the deployment of GRUMPS technology during a period of six weeks when 4.7 million such actions were collected from 141 first year university students learning Ada programming. We suggest our approach can be characterised as REDDI, Rapidly Evolving Digitally-Derived Investigations. Data preparation and cleaning is noted as a bottleneck in generic data collection, but seems less so as techniques are developed and understood.