Title: Designing Useful Learning Analytics: Developing an Adaptable LA Dashboard for the School of Informatics
Author: Stefania Sandu, Pavlos Andreadis and Cristina Adriana Alexandru
Theme: Innovation & Creativity in Teaching
Learning Analytics (LA) involves the collection and analysis of data for extracting insights and designing interventions that improve teaching and learning. The University of Edinburgh has laid out a LA policy that emphasises its strategic value. Despite the perceived benefits to our students, LA has not seen widespread adoption. We identify the ad-hoc development of customised solutions and the lack of availability of an adaptable infrastructure as key reasons. Our goal is the development of a LA Dashboard that works School-wide and adapts to the requirements of the individual user, computing infrastructure, and availability of data.
We aim to develop a system that does not cater to a limited initial set of functionalities, but rather allows teaching staff to easily set up LA processes that cater to the requirements of their courses or institution-wide decisions. Flexibility in data gathering, processing, and the user interface is a requirement for this goal. In our poster, we will present preliminary work addressing this in the context of The School of Informatics:
- The development of a prototype LA service for the School of Informatics, which considered LA functionalities in the literature and market, data requirements and sources in the school, and the needs of the school’s admin, student and teaching staff.
- An investigation of the processes by which one could extract data from sources available within the School and make it available to a teaching staff user in the front-end. The focus was on the software back-end with designs and proposed processes for data extraction, storage, processing, and exposure via a front-end facing Application Protocol Interface.
- The development of a customisable LA dashboard for the School of Informatics, which considered different user requirements.
We describe the requirements for an LA Dashboard that would consistently see use within an institute without requiring regular overhaul, using the School of Informatics as a case study. We also include preliminary designs for the back and front-end of a system serving this Dashboard and discuss what work is still required before deployment.
