ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ

Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ 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 ; ). 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 (; ). 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 () 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 was 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 was 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

2024 - 2025 (Pilot)

An import step in the LA roadmap is to evaluate if the intended goal of the project was reached. 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. However, while there was an expected benefit of the dashboard at individual and group level, in practice most benefit was experienced at the group level, allowing teachers to infer patterns in student consultation of materials. Based on that information, the teachers adapted the content of tutorial sessions, allowing them to put effort into those materials and activities that would benefit students most.

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 continuing the LA pilot with BrightSpace.

Timeline

2025 - 2026

The continuation of the pilot will run 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.

Contact information

Team LA via learninganalytics@uu.nl