Managing the Masses Developing an Educational Dashboard for Lecturers in Large-Scale Lectures

Abstract

The article presents a method to the development of a dashboard for large-scale lectures (more than 100 students) based on information derived from educational IT-applications, which play an increasingly important role in the field of university education. Via mobile devices, IT-applications enable students to interact with lecturers as well as their fellow students in large-scale settings, e.g. forum or chat. From a service perspective, lectures can be enhanced by the real-time provision of relevant and useful data. However, data created by the use of IT applications is not yet systematically used to support lecturers’ tasks, i.e,. by providing contents in a well-defined course setting. Feedback comes in the guise of information gathered through the adoption of said devices, e.g,. on what students have understood and which students are intellectually engaged. We are thus in the process of developing a dashboard, which collects information during the lectures to support lecturers’ increasing interaction. We collected design requirements based on experts’ testimonials and relevant literature. These have led to a mock-up which we designed according to literature and expert requirements. We introduce our planned steps to validate the proposed design guidelines through the implementation and evaluation of a proof-of-concept prototype dashboard.