Tracking student progress online

Frequent assessments of learning progress by each student in a classroom delivers on the promise of quality education. By doing so, educators can keep a check on students that require more active interventions and those that can perform with the standard methods of teaching. This enables timely course corrections and offers a more hands-on experience of learning. Before the pandemic changed things for the education sector, the physical classroom was a ground for enriched learning by way of interactions with peers, faculty and available resources like libraries and study spaces. A holistic education was ensured through these ‘default settings’ and student progress was clear to see for the educator and parent. With digital learning, tracking a student’s progress has become a bit challenging largely due to the impermeability of physical experiences in a virtual world. Despite this, most institutions have managed to cover course syllabus in the most effective manner possible. Support from parents is key to measure student involvement and helps the teacher track student progress online.

Many online resources that augment what is taught at school are available for students to pursue learning outside of the classroom. These contribute to lesson retention and acquisition of new skills. Apart from the qualitative methods of tracking progress, there are some applications that offer quantitative methods of tracking  student progress.

Right from attendance, an initial indicator of student interest, to class contributions, teachers can gauge the level of involvement and participation of individual students. More query and feedback-based interactions to assess learning paces must be facilitated at periodic intervals. For example, feedback collected immediately after a class or for certain projects. The question and answer method is also an active way to recognize the areas of improvement and consequent courses of action.

With a large focus on skill-building, supported by the introduction of the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the goalposts to measure learning outcomes have changed. And with it, the ways to track progress. Differentiated methods of instruction and its impact, periodic interventions and more interactive learning techniques are major factors in accessing a rounded education and its execution is what determines the learning curves of students. Below are some methods to track learning progress effectively:

Frequent assessments of taught concepts

This is a straightforward practice of gauging levels of comprehension and lesson retention. Post the completion of lessons, open and close-ended questions on the lesson topics either through a Q&A session or interactive techniques like quizzes and games can be used to determine the percentage of fast, medium and slow learners and interventions can be put in place to calibrate the lesson understanding  and retention. Setting learning goals and reviewing them every month also helps the educator gather an accurate picture of student progress.

Shared interactions with parents

Needless to say, the involvement of parents in their children’s education has seen an uptick with the pandemic in play. Closer supervision on class progress can be made possible with the collaboration of parents and educators. Since parents are buyers as well as stakeholders  of the educational services, establishing a common goal and receiving regular feedback from them on their children’s progress goes a long way in ensuring quality education.

Software platforms

Having technology carry out the task of tracking ensures timely alerts on when to speed up or slow down lessons and concepts. In addition to the physical forms of feedback collection to track class progress, well-structured classroom management software tools can also help the instructors gain a deeper understanding on the performance and progress. Educational platforms can aid educators in making online learning more successful and relatively stress-free when compared to traditional methods of teaching.

In a virtual world, it is more challenging to determine student development and their grasp of skills taught. Using a combination of traditional and digital methods is the way to go for educators to gain a qualitative and quantitative understanding of student learning paths as each student is different from the other. Tracking student progress is a good starting point to refine the quality of the educational experience by way of regular and constructive inputs.

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