Sten Govaerts

Learning Analytics Dashboard Applications

This article introduces learning analytics dashboards that visualize learning traces for learners and teachers. We present a conceptual framework that helps to analyze learning analytics applications for these kinds of users. We then present our own work in this area and compare with 15 related dashboard applications for learning. Most evaluations evaluate only part of our conceptual framework and do not assess whether dashboards contribute to behavior change or new understanding, probably also because such assessment requires longitudinal studies.

Learning dashboards: an overview and future research opportunities

Abstract In this paper, we present work on learning analytics that aims to support learners and teachers through dashboard applications, ranging from small mobile applications to learnscapes on large public displays. Dashboards typically capture and visualize traces of learning activities, in order to promote awareness, reflection, and sense-making, and to enable learners to define goals and track progress toward these goals. Based on an analysis of our own work and a broad range of similar learning dashboards, we identify HCI issues for this exciting research area.

The student activity meter for awareness and self-reflection

Visualization of user actions can be used in Technology Enhanced Learning to increase awareness for learners and teachers and to support self-reflection. In this paper, we present our Student Activity Meter that visualizes learner actions. We present four design iterations and results of both quantitative and qualitative evaluation studies in real-world settings that assess the usability, use and usefulness of different visualizations. Results indicate that our tool is useful for a variety of teacher and learner needs, including awareness of time spent and resource use. Tools like SAM can also be deployed in other settings that require awareness and self-reflection, e.g. in personal informatics and health monitoring, where motivated users will value the flexible mechanisms to analyze trending data.

Goal-oriented visualizations of activity tracking: a case study with engineering students

Increasing motivation of students and helping them to reflect on their learning processes is an important driver for learning analytics research. This paper presents our research on the development of a dashboard that enables self-reflection on activities and comparison with peers. We describe evaluation results of four iterations of a design based research methodology that assess the usability, use and usefulness of different visualizations. Lessons learned from the different evaluations performed during each iteration are described. In addition, these evaluations illustrate that the dashboard is a useful tool for students. However, further research is needed to assess the impact on the learning process.

Addressing learner issues with StepUp!: an evaluation

This paper reports on our research on the use of learning analytics dashboards to support awareness, self-reflection, sensemaking and impact for learners. So far, little research has been done to evaluate such dashboards with students and to assess their impact on learning. In this paper, we present the results of an evaluation study of our dashboard, called StepUp!, and the extent to which it addresses issues and needs of our students. Through brainstorming sessions with our students, we identified and prioritized learning issues and needs. In a second step, we deployed StepUp! during one month and we evaluated to which extent our dashboard addresses the issues and needs identified earlier in different courses. The results show that our tool has potentially higher impact for students working in groups and sharing a topic than students working individually on different topics.

Visualizing activities for self-reflection and awareness

With the large uptake of online learning environments in educational institutions, students and teachers interact no longer solely face-to-face and are often geographically dispersed. Distance education can make it much harder for students to position themselves in the group of fellow students and to self-reflect on their work. The teacher can have similar problems by losing the general overview of the class, which makes it hard to discover potential pitfalls of students in time. To assist with this problem, we have developed a set of visualizations of learner activities to increase awareness and to support self-reflection. This paper discusses those visualizations and evaluates the usability and user satisfaction. From these studies, first preliminary results are available of the usefulness of the tool for the students. A planned future evaluation is discussed to evaluate the real usage and impact of the tool.

Towards responsive open learning environments: the ROLE interoperability framework

In recent years, research on mash-up technologies for learning environments has gained interest. The overall goal is to enrich or replace traditional learning management systems (LMS) with mash-ups of widgets and services that can be easily combined and configured to fit the learner needs. This paper presents the implemented prototype of the ROLE interoperability framework and a business and an educational case study. The framework provides a common technical infrastructure to assemble widgets and services in Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). Evaluation results indicate that the perceived usefulness and usability is high for one case study in which a mature LMS was enriched with ROLE technology. In the second case study, an early mash-up prototype was deployed. The usefulness and usability of this early prototype were rated low, but the case study provides interesting insights for further research and development.

Towards an Online Lab Portal for Inquiry-Based STEM Learning at School

Nowadays, the knowledge economy is growing rapidly. To sustain future growth, more well educated people in STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics are needed. In the Go-Lab project we aim to motivate and orient students from an early age on to study STEM fields in their future educational path by applying inquiry learning using online labs. This paper presents an inquiry learning portal where teachers can discover, use and enhance online labs appropriate for their courses and students can acquire scientific methodology skills while doing experiments using the labs. The Go-Lab portal architecture is presented, which contains a repository of online labs, inquiry learning spaces and complementary services. The paper discusses a first version of the portal and our future plans.

Towards Portable Learning Analytics Dashboards

This paper proposes a novel approach to build and deploy learning analytics dashboards in multiple learning environments. Existing learning dashboards are barely portable: once deployed on a learning platform, it requires considerable effort to deploy the dashboard elsewhere. We suggest constructing dashboards from lightweight web applications, namely widgets. Our approach allows to port dashboards with no additional cost between learning environments that implement open specifications (Open Social and Activity Streams) for data access and use widget APIs. We propose to facilitate reuse by sharing the dashboards and widgets via a centralized analytics repository.

The Smart Device specification for remote labs

This paper presents the Smart Device specification to interface with remote labs. To encourage the broader sharing of remote labs, the Smart Device paradigm decouples the client from the server and provides well-defined interfaces between client and server. Such Smart Device services are exposed on the Internet and enable interoperability with client applications, other Smart Devices and external services (e.g. a booking service). This papers presents the extensible and platform-agnostic specification of the Smart Device services and internal functionalities. The Smart Device specification contains sufficient service metadata to enable the automatic generation of basic client applications. The specification is illustrated through an example and first implementations of the specification are presented.