Design and implementation of dashboards to support teachers decision-making process in e-assessment systems

Abstract

The growing number of universities adopting some form of e-learning in recent years has raised some concerns about how to ensure students’ authentication, and the authorship of the assessment activities they deliver. There are several strategies and market tools that can help teachers in these tasks. While the usage of plagiarism detection tools for checking authorship is common practice (above all in fully online universities), the use of biometric instruments for ensuring students’ identity is less extended. Although all these tools collect a large amount and variety of data, there is a lack of software systems that can integrate such data, and show the information that may be extracted from these data in a visual and meaningful way that fits the teachers’ needs. Precisely, the objective of this chapter is to present a set of dashboards that integrate data collected by different kinds of authentication and authorship instruments, oriented to assist the decision-making process of teachers, above all in case of suspicion of students’ dishonest academic behavior. Although these dashboards have been designed and implemented in the context of TeSLA project, the experience and conclusions provided here are of interest to researchers and practitioners aiming to develop dashboards with learning analytics purposes at higher education. For this reason, this chapter also provides a discussion and review of the most prominent analytical efforts in universities.