Paper Title
The Effect of Student Engagement on Grades in Online Courses

Abstract
In the past decades, online learning has experienced tremendous growth and changed the landscape of higher education. The institutions and educators must better understand how students’ interactions with online course content and peers impact learning and academic performance. With the development of learning analytics, students' learning behaviors are automatically recorded by learning analytics embedded in the learning management system that provides the opportunity to monitor students' learning, participation, and progress in the online classrooms. The objective of this study was to explore the relationship between student engagement and academic performance in the online entry-level and capstone graduate courses in health care administration. Four duration variables, times spent in the entire course, discussion boards, the library and writing center resources, and course tools, were selected and used to measure student engagement. Results show that significant difference in student engagement between entry-level and capstone graduate courses was obtained. High achievers in the entry-level course spent significantly longer time than their peers, but such a finding was not statistically different in capstone courses. The limitations of this study and future research studies were detailed to conclude this paper. Index Terms - Student engagement, student success, learning analytics, online education, learning management system.