Educational monitoring tool based on faceted browsing and data portraits

Abstract

Due to the idiosyncrasy of online education, students may become disoriented, frustrated or confused if they do not receive the support, feedback or guidance needed to be successful. To avoid this, the role of teachers is essential. In this regard, instructors should be facilitators who guide students throughout the teaching-learning process and arrange meaningful learner-centered experiences. However, unlike face-to-face classes, teachers have difficulty in monitoring their learners in an online environment, since a lot of learning management systems provide faculty with student tracking data in a poor tabular format that is difficult to understand. In order to overcome this drawback, this paper presents a novel graphical educational monitoring tool based on faceted browsing that helps instructors to gain an insight into their classrooms' performance. Moreover, this tool depicts information of each individual student by using a data portrait. Thanks to this monitoring tool, teachers can, on the one hand, track their students during the teaching-learning process and, on the other, detect potential problems in time.