Teacher dashboard for course activity regulation

Utrecht University strives to offer high quality, personalized education. To enable teachers to adapt to students' interests and needs, we developed a dashboard that visualizes student engagement with course materials. The goal is to enable teachers to monitor students' progress in the course, to provide personalized recommendations for course materials, and to adapt their teaching strategies.

Background

Earlier research into student engagement has shown that students’ interactions in the learning management system correlates with students’ completion of the course and their course grade (Lust et al., 2013; Jovanovic et al., 2017). Of particular relevance is that students that show little activity in the first few weeks of a course are especially at risk of not passing the course (Pardo et al., 2018; Van Leeuwen et al., 2019). The aim of this project is therefore to provide teachers with information about student progress and course material use, so they can adapt their course materials and/or provide additional suggestions tailored to students' needs. Furthermore, at the end of the course the dashboard can serve as an additional way to evaluate course materials and the structure of the course.

The dashboard

The teacher dashboard was developed in powerBI and vizualizes data from the learning management system Brightspace. For each course material, for each week in the course, the percentage of the enrolled students who interacted with that particular material (group level) is shown. It is also specified for each material for how long students on average watched the material, so that teachers can provide recommendations for additional materials or point students to materials that may not have been studied yet. Further, for each week of the course, it is shown whether students logged in to the course environment in Brightspace.

To get the most out of the dashboard, team LA will provide you as a teacher with a manual about how to structure your course in Brightspace. For example, if you offer your course videos bvia the UU video platform, we are able to display how long students on average watched the video. Team LA can advise you and help you with the technical details if needed.

Evaluation

An import step in any LA project is to evaluate if the intended goal of the project was reached. 

The dashboard was piloted in the academic year 2024-2025. Both teachers and students were interviewed about how they perceived the use of the dashboard during the course.  The teachers mentioned that they consulted the dashboard every week during the course. They found the dashboard generally easy to use and valuable. They consulted the dashboard to track student activity, which helped tailor tutorial sessions based on material engagement and also used the dashboard to engage students, offer reminders, and highlight key resources. For the teachers, it was an eye-opener to have insight into which materials were opened by students and which were not. Students were also positive about the project, indicating they noticed teachers’ adaptation of tutorials, and there is some evidence that students’ motivation went up. Students also saw the dashboard’s potential for personalizing education but expressed concerns about how it could affect teacher-student dynamics, though in this case, no negative effects were noted.

Overall, the project highlighted the potential of LA to improve teaching strategies and student engagement. We are therefore continuing the project and will evaluate results at the end of each academic block. Privacy officers and the ethical board for research approved of the research plan. 

Timeline

This project runs in academic year 2025-2026. If you are interested in participating as a teacher with a UU course, please contact us and we will help you set up. You can still sign up for blocks 3 and 4, or indicate interest for next academic year (2026-2027).

Contact information

Team LA via learninganalytics@uu.nl