Evaluation of a Data-To-Text System for Verbalizing a Learning Analytics Dashboard

Abstract

The SoftLearn Activity Reporter is a data-to-text service, which automatically generates textual reports about the activity developed by students within the SoftLearn virtual learning environment. In this paper, we describe the conception of the service, its architecture, and its subsequent evaluation by an expert pedagogue, where 20 full reports generated from real data from an undergraduate course supported by the SoftLearn platform were assessed. Results show that the automatically generated reports are a valuable complementary tool for explaining teachers and students the information comprised in a learning analytics dashboard.