Designing a post activity learning analytics dashboard through information visualization methods

Abstract: Rapid developments in the educational system significantly facilitate the popularisation of education, making education more accessible. The learning process should be systematically analyzed to assist teaching, however, traditional learning systems provide limited support for educators. The learning analytics dashboard is, therefore, becoming a popular tool to provide insights into the learning process by analyzing and interpreting the collected data with effective visualizations. With the purpose of improving pedagogical decision-making, it is of importance to provide a comprehensive overview and informative feedback for the learning process. This study aims to explore the affordances and challenges of designing a comprehensive learning analytics dashboard for educators to support personalized learning and adaptive teaching. A large amount of research on the learning analytics dashboard was reviewed as the theoretical foundation. The prototype of the dashboard was developed based on the obtained theories. To examine the prototype, a user study with user experience designers was conducted to evaluate the clarity of the visualization and the effectiveness of the dashboard. The results summarised from the thematic analysis indicated that the dashboard could serve as a potentially valuable tool with overall clear interaction to support educators, and the visualization was considered intuitive to understand the connection of multiple data points. Suggestions for designing a learning analytics dashboard are discussed in terms of visualization, consistency, conception, navigation, interaction, information via text, visual appearance, functionality, and privacy. To further improve the affordances of the dashboard, future research with educators is of importance to conduct.