Enhancing Distance Learning in African Universities: A Moodle Plugin for Personalized Support and Improved Engagement

Faced with growing enrolments, a shortage of teaching staff and limited capacity, African universities are struggling to manage access to higher education, particularly in Senegal. Distance learning appears to be an essential solution to these challenges of massification and unequal access. However, distance learning platforms face a number of obstacles, such as the absence of personalized feedback, the lack of teacher time for individualized support, and students' difficulties in identifying relevant pedagogical resources. To overcome these limitations, we developed a Moodle plugin to integrate a detailed dashboard. This enables students to track their performance, access personalized recommendations, and teachers to automatically analyze assessments to detect trends and difficulties. A student feedback system has also been implemented, using Asterisk to launch automatic calls to students experiencing difficulties. This solution aims to improve efficiency and engagement in distance learning. Our future work focuses on Reducing university drop-outs through smart contract.