A qualitative evaluation of a learning dashboard to support advisor-student dialogues

This paper presents an evaluation of a learning dashboard that supports the dialogue between a student and a study advisor. The dashboard was designed, developed, and evaluated in collaboration with study advisers. To ensure scalability to other contexts, the dashboard uses data that is commonly available at any higher education institute. It visualizes the grades of the student, an overview of the progress through the year, his/her position in comparison with peers, sliders to plan the next years and a prediction of the length of the bachelor program for this student in years based on historic data. The dashboard was deployed at KU Leuven, Belgium and used in September 2017 to support 224 sessions between students and study advisers. We observed twenty of these conversations. We also collected feedback from 101 students with questionnaires. Results of our observations indicate that the dashboard primarily triggers insights at the beginning of a conversation. The number of insights and the level of these insights (factual, interpretative and reflective) depends on the context of the conversation. Most insights were triggered in conversations with students doubting to continue the program, indicating that our dashboard is useful to support difficult decision-making processes.