Visual analytics for increasing efficiency of higher education institutions

Abstract

Higher education institutions have a major interest in increasing the educational quality and its effectiveness. Student retention and graduation levels constitute a particularly important quality measure of their effort. Academic Analytics is the business intelligence term used in academic settings. It especially facilitates creation of actionable intelligence to enhance learning and student success. Exploration and interactive visualization of multivariate data without significant reduction of dimensionality remains a challenge. Visual Analytics tools like Motion Charts show changes over time by presenting animations within twodimensional space. In this paper, we present the Visual Analytics tool EDAIME intended for exploratory analysis of Academic Analytics. The tool supports various interactive data visualization methods and especially concerns with implementation of enhanced Motion Charts concept adjusted to academic settings. We utilize the capabilities of the tool in order to confirm the hypothesis concerning student retention. We also describe the design and the implementation of the interactive data visualization tool in detail.