Designing LADs That Promote Sensemaking: A Participatory Tool

Abstract

Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) are data visualization tools built to empower teachers and learners to make purposeful decisions that impact the learning process. Due to their relatively recent emergence and the scarcity of studies on their design principles, dashboard design remains a major area of investigation in learning analytics research, and large scale diffusion to their stakeholders remains limited. We promote human-centered approaches for LADs design since their success in terms of acceptance and adoption greatly depends on the level of stakeholder involvement in their design. In this paper, we present a tool to support the participatory design of LADs. First experiments during a pilot study with teachers demonstrate that the proposed tool encourages group work, and in-depth exploration of LADs use.