Analysing the Behaviour of Students in Learning Management Systems with Respect to Learning Styles

Summary

Learning management systems (LMS) are successfully used in e-education but they provide the same courses for all learners rather than considering the learners’ individual needs. In recent years, more and more research is done on incorporating individual characteristics such as learning styles in technology enhanced learning. According to educational theories, learners with a strong preference for a specific learning style might have difficulties in learning if their learning style is not considered by the teaching environment. On the other hand, providing courses that fit to the individual learning styles makes learning easier for students. As a requirement for taking learning styles into consideration in LMS, the behaviour of students in online courses needs to be investigated. In this chapter, we analyse the behaviour of 43 students during an online course within an LMS with respect to their learning styles. The results show that learners with different preferences for learning styles act also differently in the course. From these results, information about the preferred way of learning and their favoured features in the LMS can be gained. On one hand, this information can be used to incorporate different features in a course in order to support different learning styles. On the other hand, the information can act as basis for providing adaptive courses. Moreover, we analysed the behaviour of students and their learning styles with respect to correlations. As a result, we found several significant correlations which can be used to investigate and develop an automatic approach for detecting learning styles based on the behaviour of learners in LMS.