Am I doing well? A4Learning as a self-awareness tool to integrate in Learning Management Systems

Most current online education scenarios use a Learning Management System (LMS) as the basecamp for the course activities. The LMS offers some centralized services and also integrates functionality from third party services (cloud services). This integration enriches the platform and increases the educational opportunities of the scenario. In such a distance scenario, with the students working in different physical spatial locations, they find difficult to determine if their activity level matches the expectation of the course. A4Learning performs a daily-updated analysis of learners’ activities by establishing the similarity between two given students. That is, finds students that are doing similar things in the Learning Management System. Then, the system finds and represents how similar students have similar achievements in the course. A4Learning can be integrated within the LMS to provide the students with a visual representation their similarity with others as an awareness mechanism, so that the students can determine the achievements of similar students in previous courses and estimate their own performance.