Course Management - Page Tracking

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The Page Tracking tool allows you to see which pages in the course have been accessed by students, how many times the pages have been accessed ("Hits" in WebCT terminology) and which pages the students spent most time on. This information might then be used to determine which portions of the course need additional work and which pages students have most difficulty with.

The Page Tracking tool can be accessed from the Homepage toolbar by clicking on Course Management Page Tracking. The top frame then displays the listing of the pages which make up the course (Figure 1), whereas the bottom frame displays the Totals toolbar(Figure 2).

Figure 1 Example Page Tracking screen

The table contains the following columns:

Page Name: The title of the page
Hits: The number of times the page has been accessed
Time: The total time that all students have spent on this page
Time/Hit: The average time spent per hit
Posts: The number of bulletin board postings made from the page

Note: it is difficult to determine exactly how long students spend on a particular page, since it is not possible to determine when a student stops viewing the page. WebCT assumes that if more than 30 minutes elapse between page accesses, the previously viewed page should not be counted. This may affect the correctness of the Average Time Spent values, but for large samples, these will still give reasonable approximations.

The initial listing is ordered according to the order that the pages appear on each path. The listing can be reordered for any column by clicking on the title of a particular column.

The bottom frame shows summary information for all of the pages in the course:

Figure 2 Example Page Tracking Totals screen (in the designer frame)

Note: You can clear your Page Tracking Totals screen by clicking Reset on the right hand side of the toolbar. This will bring up a warning message asking you to confirm that you do want to reset the page tracking statistics. Press OK to proceed with the deletion or Cancel to return to your Page Tracking screen without making any changes.