In this paper, we explore the design of a student-facing dashboard for online and distance learning with a focus on capturing and addressing specific learning needs. A participatory process involving 20 students was employed, which included a screening questionnaire and focus group discussions. The selection of data points to be displayed on the…

Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to revolutionize the analysis of educational data, significantly impacting learning analytics (LA). This study explores the capability of non-experts, including administrators, instructors, and students, to effectively use GenAI for descriptive LA tasks without requiring specialized knowledge in data…

Over the last decade, the prevalence of online learning has dramatically increased. As part of their curriculum, students are expected to spend more and more time watching videos. These videos tend to follow a widespread format: a screen recording of slides with a picture-in-picture (PiP) image of the instructor's face. While this format is…

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in educational assessments and professional certification exams. Managing large repositories of MCQs, however, poses several challenges due to the high volume of questions and the need to maintain their quality and relevance over time. One of these challenges is the presence of questions that…

Students organize and manage their own learning time, choosing when, what, and how to study due to the flexibility of online learning. Each person has unique learning habits that define their behaviours and distinguish them from others. To investigate the temporal behaviour of students in online learning environments, we seek to identify suitable…

Open Learning Analytics (OLA) is an emerging concept in the field of Learning Analytics (LA). It deals with learning data collected from multiple environments and contexts, analyzed with a wide range of analytics methods to address the requirements of different stakeholders. Due to this diversity in different dimensions of OLA, the LA developers…

Recent research on learning analytics dashboards has focused on designing user interfaces that offer various forms of "visualization guidance" (often referring to notions such as "data storytelling" or "narrative visualization") to teachers (e.g., emphasizing data points or trends with colour and adding annotations),…

Educational technology is shifting toward facilitating personalized learning. Such personalization, however, requires a detailed understanding of students' problem-solving processes. Sequence analysis (SA) is a promising approach to gaining granular insights into student problem solving; however, existing techniques are difficult to interpret…

With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of educators, may lead to different ways of looking at data. This observation motivates the need to carefully…

Learning analytics dashboards commonly visualize data about students with the aim of helping students and educators understand and make informed decisions about the learning process. To assist with making sense of complex and multidimensional data, many learning analytics systems and dashboards have relied strongly on AI algorithms based on…

From a human-centred computing perspective, supporting the interpretation of educational dashboards and visualizations by the people intended to use them exposes critical design challenges that may often be trivialized. Empirical evidence already shows that "usable" visualizations are not necessarily effective from an educational…

One feature of self-paced online courses is greater learner control over the timing of their work in a course. However, the greater timing flexibility that learners enjoy in such environments may play a different role in the learning process than has been previously observed in formal online or face-to-face courses. As such, the study of work…

Designing, validating, and deploying learning analytics tools for instructors or students is a challenge that requires techniques and methods from different disciplines, such as software engineering, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, educational design, and psychology. Whilst each has established its own design methodologies, we now…

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…

There is an urgent need for our educational system to shift assessment regimes from a narrow, high-stakes focus on grades, to more holistic definitions that value the qualities that lifelong learners will need. The challenge for learning analytics in this context is to deliver actionable assessments of these hard-to-quantify qualities, valued by…