Learning analytics dashboards

TLDR

Learning analytics dashboards are central to the LAK vision, aiming to enhance human sense‑making and decision‑making by visualising learner data for diverse stakeholders, and recent work has expanded from early visualisation and prediction studies to participatory design, multimodal data acquisition, and theoretical foundations. This paper reviews past and current research on learning analytics dashboards and reports findings from the VISLA19 workshop to identify common practices and challenges in the field. The authors compile literature and workshop outcomes, using participatory design insights and multimodal data to map practices and challenges. Based on the analysis, the authors propose a research agenda to guide future development of learning analytics dashboards.

Abstract

Learning analytics dashboards are at the core of the LAK vision to involve the human into the decision-making process. The key focus of these dashboards is to support better human sense-making and decision-making by visualising data about learners to a variety of stakeholders. Early research on learning analytics dashboards focused on the use of visualisation and prediction techniques and demonstrates the rich potential of dashboards in a variety of learning settings. Present research increasingly uses participatory design methods to tailor dashboards to the needs of stakeholders, employs multimodal data acquisition techniques, and starts to research theoretical underpinnings of dashboards. In this paper, we present these past and present research efforts as well as the results of the VISLA19 workshop on "Visual approaches to Learning Analytics" that was held at LAK19 with experts in the domain to identify and articulate common practices and challenges for the domain. Based on an analysis of the results, we present a research agenda to help shape the future of learning analytics dashboards.