Monitoring distance education students' practical programming activities

Students studying a distance education course on introductory object-oriented programming are provided with a set of practical activities to support their learning. Each practical activity consists of a set of tasks to be worked through at home over a specified period of time. Whilst students are provided with considerable guidance on how to approach their practical work we have no knowledge of their actual behaviour. Therefore, we set up a project named AESOP to monitor what students actually do. This paper describes the AESOP system for recording and analysing the work done when undertaking the practical activities. Results have been obtained from an analysis of data from 30 students studying the 1999 presentation and 200 students on the 2000 presentation about their attempts at 8 sets of practical work. We found significant differences between the course designer’s perception of student work and how students actually behave. Students usually needed significantly less time to complete their practical work than expected indicating that their perception of the difficulty of the tasks set is often different from that of the course designers. We also found that there is a tendency for students to limit their interaction with the computer to about 30 to 40 minutes.