CLICK, CLICK, CLICK: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STUDENT ENGAGEMENT WITH ONLINE COURSE CONTENT AND FINAL GRADE

If you have ever created content for an online course, or “clicked” your way through one for any reason, you may recognize that there is a wide margin of thoroughness in what is available in that medium. This study is planned to examine the relationship between the amount of time students, in an online course, take in reviewing the provided course content and their grades in the course. The Learning Management System at my educational institution provides data on student logins to the entire system, where students click within a course offering, and the total time spent in the online course, measured in seconds. There are many challenges with this kind of data: Are students actually reading the material while on a particular page, for example? Do the students have any meaningful engagement with the content or do they mindlessly click through it? The study will not provide definitive answers to those thorny questions but is intended to be exploratory in nature, providing broad strokes of information on the relationship between engagement with online course content and student course grade.