Interactive Data Visualization for Learning Analytics

Overview

Originally presented at IEEE VisComm 2021, you can read the background and play with the interactive visualizations. Scroll down to get to the dynamic/interactive portion (works on mobile but better-appreciated on a large screen).

How do students move through the quiz questions in a course over time? In this work, we present an animation of assessment-taking on a day-by-day basis over a course. The motivation for creating this is that, unlike an on-the-ground class where students are sitting in front of a teacher, most, if not all, activity in an online course may be invisible to a course teacher or administrator in the absence of analytics that show students’ progress and performance.

In personal experience, it is also common for teachers to have an expectation that students taking an online course progress through released material in a relatively timely fashion. But is this the norm or not? And how can we visualize students’ actual behavior in terms of progress and performance? As more instruction shifts online, tools to help teachers understand how their students’ are engaging with material may prove to be valuable. Course designers and developers may also use this knowledge for continuous improvement and to see the effect of changes in course structure or incentives.