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Learning Analytics (LA) dashboards help raise student and teacher awareness regarding learner activities. In blog-supported and inquiry-based learning courses, LA data is not limited to student activities, but also contains an abundance of digital learner artefacts, such as blog posts, hypotheses, and mind-maps. Exploring peer activities and artefacts can help students gain new insights and perspectives on learning efforts and outcomes, but requires effort. To help facilitate facilitate and promote this exploration, we present the lessons learnt during and guidelines derived from the design, deployment and evaluation of five dashboards.

The adequate emotional state of students has proved to be essential for favoring learning. This paper explores the possibility of obtaining students' feedback about the emotions they feel in class in order to discover potential emotion patterns that might indicate learning fails. This paper presents a visual dashboard that allows students to track their emotions and follow up on their evolution during the course. We have compiled the principal classroom related emotions and developed a two-phase inquiry process to: verify the possibility to measure students' emotions in classroom; discover how emotions can be displayed to promote self-reflection; and confirm the impact of emotions on learning performance. Our results suggest that students' emotions in class are related to evaluation marks. This shows that early information about students' emotions can be useful for teachers and students to improve classroom results and learning outcomes.

Abstract. This paper reports on our ongoing research around learning analytics. We focus on how learning analytics can be used to increase student motivation and the use of badges as a way to aggregate learning activity being a representation of their goals and progress along the course. The context of this work is an open learning environment, based on wikis, blogs, twitter, an activity stream mash-up and an open badges system. Our evaluation analyses perceived usefulness and usability of the system, as well as the impact on student motivation. Our results indicate that badges are useful to motivate students while activity streams have the potential to activate students.

This paper introduces LARAe (Learning Analytics Reflection & Awareness environment), a teacher-oriented dashboard that visualizes learning traces from students, badges and course content. We also present an evaluation of the dashboard in a course on Human-Computer Interaction. The LARAe teacher dashboard provides a detailed overview of group and individual activities, achievements and course outcomes. To help visualize the abundance of traces, badges are used to abstract essential aspects of the course such as course goals and social activity. This paper reports our work on LARAe, presents the course in which we evaluated our approach with students and teachers, and analyses our first results that indicate that such an environment can help with teacher awareness.

8th LAK Conference, Sydney, NSW, Australia, Martijn Millecamp, Francisco Gutiérrez, Sven Charleer, Katrien Verbert, and Tinne De Laet ABSTRACT 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 a large university in Europe, and used in September 2017 to support 224 sessions between students and study advisers. We observed twenty of these conversations. After 101 conversations, we collected feedback from 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. CCS CONCEPTS

With the wide use of the Internet and digital data sources, there has been a recent emergence of easy access to student data through learning analytics within learning management systems (LMS), grade data through student information systems (SIS) and broader sector data through benchmarking metrics and standards. With it has come the potential for greater capabilities for improving student performance through immediate feedback. Current literature considers the role of dashboards for student performance and feedback, but few papers consider the efficacy of fast feedback to students or other ways that information can be fed back to learners. In this paper, we consider the work done by three leading groups addressing the impact of gamification in university education, with a specific focus on how data is presented to the learner, that is using elements such as points, levelling up, narrative and progression to scaffold learning and provide increases in student motivation, engagement, satisfaction, retention and performance enhancements.

This article explores how information visualization techniques can be applied to learning analytics data to help teachers and students deal with the abundance of learner traces. We also investigate how the affordances of large interactive surfaces can facilitate a collaborative sense-making environment for multiple students and teachers to explore these learner traces together.