Student participation in online courses: Who are active students and who are not

While the use of online courses as a supplementary component for traditional classroom is a common approach to E-learning, it is essential to devise some means or methodologies to evaluate student participation in order to improve and enhance the quality of teaching and learning. This article proposes the use of web access log files to evaluate student participation in online courses. The implementation of a data warehouse for online courses and how it is used to evaluate student participation are discussed. The use of OLAP to query data is an efficient and flexible method to visualize and compare student usage. The presented results are a good indicator to the instructors about student activities, whether they are active or inactive.