Abstract:

There are many higher education institutions in different countries which have compulsory courses to be taken by all undergraduate students independently on their major during their first year of enrollment. One of these courses is Statistics at Ajman University -UAE which I had been teaching during the last decade. The main challenge to Faculty members in charge of the course is how to motivate the students and make the material interesting and useful to them with the constraint that they are from different colleges with different level in Mathematics. The latter leads to either the course becomes boring to those with strong background in mathematics or difficult to those with a limited knowledge of mathematics. As a first attempt to make the course attractive to all students, the Department allocated one credit hour of the 3 credit hours of the course to Laboratory sessions using MINITAB. The results were not as good as expected. Fortunately, the introduction of the usage of MOODLE in the teaching process was very rewarding in the sense where we were able to give regular and varied assignments that suit all types of students. This is proven as a means to illustrate the practical use of statistics in various areas which give the possibility to students to select the most appropriate assignment (related to their future career objectives). We noticed that absences from classes and number of dropouts from the course during the semester decreased significantly

In this paper we present some statistical results to support the positive impact of the usage of MOODLE on the performance of students of different background using data before and after introduction of MOODLE as support tool in teaching

Keywords:

Student performance, difficulties in non-homogeneous classes, impact of MOODLE, Drop outs.