The Question-driven Dashboard: How Can We Design Analytics Interfaces Aligned to Teachers’ Inquiry?

Abstract

One of the ultimate goals of several learning analytics (LA) initiatives is to close the loop and support students’ and teachers’ reflective practices. Although there has been a proliferation of end-user interfaces (often in the form of dashboards), various limitations have already been identified in the literature such as key stakeholders not being involved in their design, little or no account for sense-making needs, and unclear effects on teaching and learning. There has been a recent call for human-centred design practices to create LA interfaces in close collaboration with educational stakeholders to consider the learning design, and their authentic needs and pedagogical intentions. This paper addresses the call by proposing a question-driven LA design approach to ensure that end-user LA interfaces explicitly address teachers’ questions. We illustrate the approach in the context of synchronous online activities, orchestrated by pairs of teachers using audio-visual and text-based tools (namely Zoom and Google Docs). This study led to the design and deployment of an open-source monitoring tool to be used in real-time by teachers when students work collaboratively in breakout rooms, and across learning spaces.