ABSTRACT
Visualisations of aspects of the learning process can show trends over time and allow comparisons between individuals or between an individual and a group. Visualisations are also available that highlight a part of the online course content, which students have spent an unusually long time accessing, suggesting that they may be finding the topic difficult or that the materials could be improved. The circle visualisation at the top of the dashboard gives an immediate feel for the proportion of students at each colour-coded level of engagement. Instructors may be interested primarily in student engagement with their course but other staff may wish to visualise activity across a range of courses. Ritsos and Roberts report that most learning analytics tools focus on dashboards, resulting in environments that enable little interaction and consist of traditional representations such as bar charts, line graphs and scatterplots. Olmos and Corrin discuss how visualisations were developed for medical students to assess their interactions with patients.
