'Spread Index:' A Metric for Identifying When Work is Completed and Quantifying Procrastination in Self-Paced, Online Teacher Professional Development Courses

Abstract

Instructional online teacher professional development (oTPD) courses have afforded teachers with a greater ability to access information, expert advice, and peer support with a schedule that meets each participant’s personal needs. For instructional designers and professional development (PD) facilitators, the time at which participants log into online courses and complete the curriculum of the course is an area of interest. One area of concern is the concept of procrastination and to what degree participants in an online course wait until the last minute to complete course tasks and projects. This paper outlines the development of a metric called spread index that reveals the degree to which work was completed by each participant in an online PD course. The spread index value ranges from 0 to 1 and represents the time at which half of a participant’s aggregate work had been completed, in terms of the beginning (0) and end (1) of the course. Developed from an actual teacher PD course that was administered in Moodle, we used system log entries from Moodle to determine when tasks were completed, how much time was spent in the system by participants as they completed tasks, and at what point in time half of their overall work was completed. This metric is applied after a course is completed, but additional variations could be possible in future work to have it serve as a real-time analytic. Although this metric was developed in the context of a teacher PD course, it has applications for both general online learning applications as well as project management.