Investigating the core group effect in usage of resources with analytics

Abstract

In many educational institutions, face to face as well as on-line teaching is supported by the use of a Learning Management System (LMS). To be able to analyze better data stored by LMS, we have started developing a dedicated tool for this purpose. While analyzing usage data with teachers, we have noticed that the number of students attempting non self-tests decreases during the semester. Teachers were interested in investigating this pattern further to uncover the strategy adopted by students. In this paper, we explain our approach to investigate the core group effect in resources usage: given a set of resources, is a group of students emerging that continuously uses the resources or, on the contrary, are the resources used on an irregular basis by different students? We answer this question checking the confidence of what we call local rules and global rules. We show a case study conducted with our analysis tool as a first step to validate our approach.