Moodog: Tracking students' Online Learning Activities

Many universities are currently using a Course Management System (CMS) to organize course materials and conduct online learning activities. However, most commercial or open source CMS software does not include comprehensive access tracking and log analysis capabilities. In this paper, we propose and implement a CMS log analysis tool, called Moodog, to track students’ online learning activities. The goals of Moodog are twofold: first, to provide instructors with insight about how students interact with online course materials, and second, to allow students to easily compare their own progress to others in the class. With the activity information available, Moodog also provides automatic email reminders to students encouraging or instructing them to view available materials that they have not yet accessed. Using Moodog, we have conducted a preliminary case study on a course held in Spring 2006 at the University of California, Santa Barbara to reveal activity patterns that occurred in this course.