Light Bulb Moments in the Classroom: Probing Design Opportunities for Ambient LA Displays in Higher Education

Teachers in higher education are tasked with the demanding job of providing support tailored to each individual student’s need. To provide tailored support, teachers need to accurately monitor students’ activities and decide on appropriate support interventions. Learning analytics applications have the potential to aid teachers to maintain an overview of their students’ activities. However, those applications are often designed as centralized graphical displays, taking teachers’ attention away from the classroom and sometimes overburdening teachers. Therefore, we investigate whether ambient LA displays offer a solution to complement traditional LA applications, as these systems are designed as objects that integrate seamlessly into the classroom context. We conducted an exploratory study in Higher Education to investigate teachers’ needs for information and their perception of ambient LA displays in relation to their teaching practice. We formulate three key findings and a set of design opportunities that flow from these findings to inform future work of supporting the HE context with ambient LA displays.