Understanding learning at a glance: an overview of learning dashboard studies

Abstract

Research on learning dashboards aims to identify what data is meaningful to different stakeholders in education, and how data can be presented to support sense-making processes. This paper summarizes the main outcomes of a systematic literature review on learning dashboards, in the fields of Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. The query was run in five main academic databases and enriched with papers coming from GScholar, resulting in 346 papers out of which 55 were included in the final analysis. Our review distinguishes different kinds of research studies as well as different aspects of learning dashboards and their maturity in terms of evaluation. As the research field is still relatively young, many of the studies are exploratory and proof-of-concept. Among the main open issues and future lines of work in the area of learning dashboards, we identify the need for longitudinal research in authentic settings, as well as studies that systematically compare different dashboard design options.