Innovative Finance
August 1, 2024
Context and Problem
Student-Centered e-Learning Environments (SCELE) and such online learning environments has been increasingly become popular. Such platforms enable asynchronous interactions between lecturers and students, enhancing flexibility in education. Moreover, such software’s do provide raw activity data, but fail to offer useful insights. Other issues include disorganized and overwhelming data logs, lack of user-friendly tools for visualizing student activity, and inefficient feedback mechanisms.
Solution
The solution was developing a learning dashboard. A plugin for Moodle was designed to visualize student activity data, enabling efficient monitoring, analysis, and evaluation. The implementation plan had four steps. First, needs analysis. This involved conducting interviews with lecturers to identify their primary challenges and requirements, and they key findings included the need for data visualization and monitoring activities such as quiz attempts. Next, design process. This involved information architecture, visualization principles, and prototype development. Third, dashboard features, such as monitoring tools to look at things such as forum activity, analysis tools to correlate student activity with learning outcomes, and evaluation tools to assess individual student performance. Lastly, evaluation and refinement, which involved prototype testing with lecturers to gather feedback, address issues like ambiguous labels and improve data visualization, and incorporate revisions.
Impact
The impact included improved monitoring as there was now a real-time insight interface which simplified tracking of participation in discussions, assignments, and quizzes. Moreover, user satisfaction increased as there was positive feedback from lecturers, and dashboards allow for streamlined data access, saving lecturers time and energy.
Note: further data collection and analysis will have to be conducted to properly understand the dashboards impact.