The My Learning Analytics (MyLA) team will share their experience developing and implementing student-facing visualizations of Canvas course data. With a focus on providing students actionable insights, the team drafted, discarded, and redesigned many prototypes along the way to piloting. This presentation focuses on the impact of collaboration between faculty researchers and ITS staff to design, develop, prototype, and pilot visualizations that support student learning. We hope to give a flavor of the process, the resulting software, and the preliminary research results.
Partnering with faculty and student researchers from the U-M School of Information and School of Education, a team from ITS Teaching & Learning developed MyLA, a set of student-facing data visualizations about student learning activity. Research on previous student-facing dashboards informed development of the tool. The visualizations provide a transparent view of students’ course standing, reveal behavioral patterns associated with good learning skills, and guide decisions about actions students can take that may improve their academic outcomes. To increase visibility, we embedded the visualizations in the normal learning workflows of the LMS.
Presenters will share the story of the tool development, as well as lessons learned and feedback from initial student users. Discussion will address how the team leveraged expertise in learning, motivation, and information visualization in an iterative approach to design and development. We will also discuss how this collaboration supports faculty research goals, provides a successful proof of concept as the first application to use the nascent Unizin Data Platform (UDP), and provides a service that supports student success.
