Indicators needed to design a student dashboard from lecturers’ perspectives: a qualitative study

Abstract

The number of students’ enrolled in Higher Education online courses is increasing, and as a result, more data about their learning process is generated. The data produced can be displayed on a dashboard and help students in their learning process. However, lecturers’ perspective should be taken into account to define the indicators of the dashboard as the design of the courses could impact on the elements included on it.  And that is precisely the aim of this paper: to define the indicators needed to design a student dashboard in online courses taking into account lecturers' perspectives. This study was carried out with 10 lecturers from the Faculty of Humanities and Education from Mondragon Unibertsitatea. Online qualitative questionnaires were used to gather participants’ perceptions. Results show that most of the lecturers participating in the research study identified four indicators to design a student dashboard: number of times students access the course forum, amount of contributions in the forum, number of times students consult the information booklet, and number of times each student has accessed the course in a week time. Conclusions drawn from this study highlight the importance of training lecturers and students on the pedagogical use of data visualization.