Learning analytics dashboards: the past, the present and the future

Learning analytics dashboards are at the core of the LAK vision to involve the human into the decision-making process. The key focus of these dashboards is to support better human sense-making and decision-making by visualising data about learners to a variety of stakeholders. Early research on learning analytics dashboards focused on the use of visualisation and prediction techniques and demonstrates the rich potential of dashboards in a variety of learning settings. Present research increasingly uses participatory design methods to tailor dashboards to the needs of stakeholders, employs multimodal data acquisition techniques, and starts to research theoretical underpinnings of dashboards. In this paper, we present these past and present research efforts as well as the results of the VISLA19 workshop on "Visual approaches to Learning Analytics" that was held at LAK19 with experts in the domain to identify and articulate common practices and challenges for the domain. Based on an analysis of the results, we present a research agenda to help shape the future of learning analytics dashboards.