Does Regularity Captured in an LMS Relate to Students' Performance in Courses of an Online Degree Program? A Case Study

In this paper, we consider an online study program that is
attended by students who mostly work full-time and therefore study
part-time. We investigate whether relationships can be found between
students’ interactions in online courses of this program and their performance
in courses. Though the study program and the courses are both
online, their delivery through the learning management system (LMS)
Moodle has not been designed to store comprehensive student interactions
automatically. Therefore, we investigated whether the weekly regularity
of students in the LMS is correlated to their performance in the
course. Weekly regularity has been introduced in the context of MOOCs
(Massive Open Online Courses) in [5]. We obtained inconclusive results.
In only a few courses we could find a strong or moderate correlation. We
conjecture that this might be due to two factors: the limitation of our
dataset and the fact that, in the context of an online degree program,
successful students do not necessarily access the learning material on a
regular weekly basis.