Multi-institutional positioning test feedback dashboard for aspiring students: lessons learnt from a case study in flanders

Abstract

Our work focuses on a multi-institutional implementation and evaluation of a Learning Analytics Dashboards (LAD) at scale, providing feedback to N=337 aspiring STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students participating in a region-wide positioning test before entering the study program. Study advisors were closely involved in the design and evaluation of the dashboard. The multi-institutional context of our case study requires careful consideration of external stakeholders and data ownership and portability issues, which gives shape to the technical design of the LAD. Our approach confirms students as active agents with data ownership, using an anonymous feedback code to access the LAD and to enable students to share their data with institutions at their discretion. Other distinguishing features of the LAD are the support for active content contribution by study advisors and LATEX type-setting of question item feedback to enhance visual recognizability. We present our lessons learnt from a first iteration in production.