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 provide personalized recommendations for course materials, and to reach out to students who may be at risk of falling behind in the course.
Background and hypotheses
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 teachers in this project therefore want to monitor student engagement with the materials, so that they can monitor students’ progress. Earlier pilots with LA (Van Leeuwen, 2019) have shown that group-level analytics alone do not provide information that is in-depth enough to act on. Therefore, in this project we aim to extend the group level analytics with individual level analytics.
The aim of this project is 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 the student needs.
Realization of the dashboard
The teacher dashboard is developed in powerBI and vizualizes data from the learning management system Blackboard. 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 student individually whether they watched the material, so that teachers can provide recommendations for additional materials. Further, for each week of the course, it is shown if students were active in BlackBoard, to check whether students are at risk of falling behind.
Evaluation
The teacher dashboard will be implemented in a course in black 1 of academic year 2024-2025. To evaluate whether the dashboard enables personalized education, the teacher in the course keeps track of her use of the dashboard via a weekly logbook. Students will be asked about their experiences at the end of the course via a short questionnaire. The teacher will also be interviewed at the end of the course. If the pilot is successfull, we will consider transferring and scaling up the project to courses in the new Birightspace LMS.
Timeline
The pilot will run in block 1 of academic year 2024 - 2025.