Digitalization of Education: Application and Best Practices Learning Analytics

Learning analytics dashboards and visualisations

Learning-analytics dashboards (LAD) are the main trend in the literature since they mirror the students’ behaviour back to the students and to the teachers. Learning dashboard is defined as “a single display that aggregates multiple visualisations of different indicators about learner(s), learning process(es), and/or learning context”. Millecamp (2018) present a LAD that supports the dialogue between a student and a study advisor. To ensure transfer to other contexts (in terms of scalability), the dashboard visualises data that is commonly available in higher education, like the grades of the student, study progress, and academic ranking in comparison with peers (i.e., social comparison), and a prediction of the duration of study for the bachelor program for this student, based on historic data. A dashboard was deployed at KU Leuven (Belgium) to support discussion sessions. The results indicate that the dashboard primarily triggers reflective conversations with students doubting to continue the bachelor program, indicating that the dashboard is useful to support difficult decision-making processes. Another example presents the Student Activity Meter (SAM) for awareness and self-reflection (Govaerts et al., 2011). SAM visualises learning activates within online learning environments for learners and teachers to help increase awareness and to support self-reflection. This dashboard supports the following teacher objectives:
- Awareness for teachers of what and how learners are doing is important to assess learners progress
- SAM visualises the time learners spent and the resources they used
- Time tracking information allows teachers to assess their initial time estimates with the real time spending of the students and fin the exercises that consume most time
- The resource usage can show the popular learning materials and enables resource discovery, through a list of most used or most time spent on resources in SAM.
The results of the conducted case study show that SAM contributes to creating awareness for teachers. It enables: 1) to find students doing well and at risk, 2) a better course overview, and 3) understanding student time spending. Most of the participants wanted to continue using SAM.

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