The ultimate goal of using learning analytics dashboards is to improve teaching and learning processes. Instructors that use an analytics dashboard are presented with data about their students and/or about their teaching practices. Despite growing research in analytics dashboards, little is known about how instructors make sense of the data they receive and reflect on it. Moreover, there is limited evidence on how instructors who use these dashboards take further actions and improve their pedagogical practices. My dissertation work addresses these issues by examining instructors’ sense making, reflective practice and subsequent actions taken from classroom analytics in three phases: (a) problem analysis from systematic literature review (current), (b) implementation and examination of instructors’ sense-making and reflective practice (current) and (c) human-centered approaches to co-designing instructors’ dashboards with stakeholders (current). The findings will contribute to the conceptual basis of instructors’ change of their pedagogical practices and practical implications of human-centered principles in designing effective dashboards.

Effective implementation of evidence-based pedagogical strategies is key to improving teaching and learning. Instructors need innovative opportunities for frequent observation, feedback, and reflection on the use of their pedagogical approaches. Learning analytics dashboards are a new wave of innovative technology illustrating data visualizations. Dashboards are designed to amplify the perceptual capabilities to improve instructors’ decision-making and reflection while increasing awareness about the learning process. In this research, we design an automated feedback dashboard, TEACHActive, that outputs visualizations from an automated sensing observation system, EduSense, in engineering classrooms. TEACHActive dashboard provides automated feedback on the in-class implementation of active learning pedagogical strategies. These visualizations illustrate metrics such as frequency of hand raises, instructor speech, student speech, and behavioral engagement indicators. We used a human-centered approach to design the different prototypes of the dashboard. Our human-centered design approach included techniques such as creating personas, conducting user interviews, and implementing user walk-through sessions.I will present the human-centered approach used for the TEACHActive prototype development process with illustrative prototypes.

We presented the TEACHActive feedback dashboard system at the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems as a lake-breaking work. We presented the TEACHActive prototype development process with illustrative prototypes. 

You can access our extended abstract proceedings here.